In the Clear Light of Day
by girastelle
Summary: What if one day Edward pushed his self-control past the breaking point? What if Bella weren't so eager to give up her humanity? What will they sacrifice to be together? An Eclipse-ish era story, rated M for lemons and language and angst.
1. Chapter 1

**In the Clear Light of Day**

It was a Saturday afternoon, the Cullen house was empty, and Edward had a new bed – a bed on which Bella found herself, Edward beside her.

He rolled her over across the wide smooth expanse of the sheets, and, holding himself up above her on his elbows, lightly traced the outline of her lips with his cool tongue.

Bella's lips parted involuntarily and she was suddenly, urgently, aware of the weight of him lying above her, pressing her hips into the mattress. He had held her close before but not like this, not so fully pressed to him, his long legs sprawled around hers. A vein of fire lanced through her, from her constricted throat to low in her belly. She took a shuddering breath and her eyelids fluttered closed. As if of their own volition, her hands clutched at the side belt loops on his jeans, pulling him down more tightly against her as she snaked her legs around his.

Edward pulled back. Sensing his reaction, Bella opened her eyes with an effort. His amber gaze was guarded and wary. Knowing that his next words would be, _no, Bella, time to stop,_ she pushed herself up on her elbows, seeking his lips with hers. Her mouth met his briefly and he pulled back again, moving away from her with less of his customary grace than she had ever seen. Bella followed, reaching for him, until somehow they were kneeling facing each other in the middle of the bed. Edward's eyes were still guarded, but his hands were on her hips, and if he wasn't pushing her away.

She stretched up to kiss him again, keeping her lips soft, and when she sucked gently at his lower lip, she felt him respond. Swiftly, without asking permission -- _as if I could escape his attention_, she thought -- she unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. When he didn't stop her, she continued, traveling lower and lower, until the fabric parted under her hands. Fingers tingling, she slid her hands under his shirt, tracing the marble-cool contours of his chest. He broke off the kiss, eyes searching her face, the tiniest crease appearing between his eyebrows.

"Bella…" Her name from his lips was a half-whisper, a plea.

She slid her hands to his shoulders, pushing his shirt back so that it dropped down to the crooks of his arms. He was still watching her, and she took a deep breath, looked straight into his golden eyes, and grabbed the hem of her tee-shirt, ready to pull it over her head.

"Bella." His hands clasped her wrists, stilling her; his voice was less uncertain now. All at once the words broke from her.

"Oh, Edward, please." His hands didn't release her. "Please, what are we waiting for?" He didn't say anything, but the frown was more pronounced between his eyes now. "I'm here," she murmured. "I'm willing. I _want_ this." She was being outrageously forward, she knew, and the color rose in her cheeks, but he seemed to sense the heat under her skin and watched her face with his lips slightly parted. There was desire in him still, no matter how he might try to repress it. "I want _you_," she said, and bent her head to kiss his hand where it encircled her wrist. He was watching her, helplessly, and she parted her lips and sucked the tip of his thumb into her mouth, ice on her tongue.

In a flash he was across the room, and Bella toppled forward on the bed, catching herself with her hands just in time. Edward was breathing heavily as he pulled his desk chair in front of him, as if to make a barrier between himself and the bed. He passed a hand distractedly through his hair and shrugged his shirt back onto his shoulders, though he made no move to button it back up.

"Bella, we can't." His voice was strained.

She sat back on her heels. "We can't even try? We won't know until we try."

He closed his eyes, gripping the back of the chair until the wood and leather creaked ominously. "You don't know what you're asking for."

Anger suddenly blossomed inside her. "I know exactly what I'm asking for," she burst out. "I'm tired of the teasing, and I think you are too. Do you expect me to be satisfied forever with a few kisses? Are _you_ satisfied with just a few kisses here and there?" He opened his eyes and shot her a look so filled with naked hunger that the fire throbbed in her again, as well as a flicker of hope. Her voice dropped. "I'm here, and I love you, but I hate that you're making me beg."

He gave a groan of longing and strode toward the bed, knocking the heavy chair easily out of his way. "Do you think I don't want this, too?" he breathed, climbing onto the bed, pulling her to him with one arm wrapped around her waist. "Do you honestly believe I don't think about it every time I'm with you?" he breathed in her ear, his free hand twining in her hair. Bella, stunned by his nearness, couldn't respond. "But it would be so easy -- so terribly easy -- to lose control," he whispered, pulling back from her, hands on either side of her face. "I hate to think I might never be able to be with you fully, the way you want. But I also can't bear to think what might happen to you if I can't control myself."

Bella reached up to touch his face, tracing the outline of his downturned mouth. He turned his head and kissed her palm, inhaled against the inside of her wrist. "You won't hurt me," she whispered. "I trust you not to hurt me, Edward."

His eyes closed as if in pain. "You don't know," he mumbled into her palm.

"I do know." She stroked the glorious coppery mess of his hair. She was losing him, and knew it -- he was retreating into the iron shell of his will, but it stung like rejection. The tears were going to start soon, and she hated them, hated her weakness in the face of his strength. She bit her lip fiercely, the heat rushing to her face, eyes and throat tight with unshed tears.

"Bella." Edward was looking into her face, curious. She blinked hard, and he stroked the line of her jaw, the red unhappy swelling under her eyes. "You really want this," he said softly, wonder in his voice. "And not just because you think it will make me happy. You want this."

She sniffled inelegantly and was mortified, but nodded. "Of course I do."

"You're not going to let it go, are you?"

She looked right into his eyes, and shook her head.

He drew her to him, pressed his forehead to hers, and as always her heart accelerated with his closeness. He made a soft sound of disbelief. "I can hear you respond to me," he whispered. "Somehow I always convinced myself that you didn't really desire this. That I was only projecting my own desire onto you." He laughed softly. "I thought there was no way you could want me as much as I want you."

Bella chuckled, hope flaring deep inside her. "You're not in the Victorian era anymore, Edward."

His hands stroked up and down her back, her arms, and the goosebumps followed his touch. "I don't deserve this trust you have in me."

She pressed herself against him, and he made a soft sound of wanting. "We can get hurt no matter what we do," Bella whispered, feeling the ring of truth in her voice. "If I had chosen to do this with Mike Newton or Jacob Black they could have hurt me too."

Edward's eyes snapped open, and in the space of a heartbeat he had whirled her around and laid her on the bed. "Mike Newton or Jacob Black," he repeated in a growl. "Neither of them --" he murmured, planting kisses on her lips, her cheekbones, her jawline, "will ever touch you --" settling his weight alongside her, above her, "ever again. Not until my ashes are scattered to the four winds," he whispered into the hollow at the base of her throat.

Bella gasped, tipping her head back into the feather pillows. "That will never happen," she whispered over his head. "I won't let them scatter your ashes unless they're mingled with mine."

Despite the cold of his body, she was on fire from his touch, from the play of his muscles as he moved above her, from the weight of him against her. She throbbed wherever he touched her, as his hands roamed more freely than they ever had before – curling under her ribs, spanning the flat soft plane of her stomach. His mouth covered hers hungrily. On a sudden impulse, she seized his wrist and pulled his hand to her breast.

Edward reared up away from her and looked down at his hand, cupping her over her shirt, with a disbelief that was almost comical painted across his face. "This…" He looked up at her face, then back at his hand. "This is really okay?"

She laughed, a little giddily. "Yes, of course it's okay," she said, breathlessly. "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

His hips moved infinitesimally against her, and he tried an experimental stroke of his thumb over her nipple. She gasped with the shadow of a moan, and he echoed the sound, bending to her mouth again, hand working softly at her breast.

She tugged at his shirt again, and in a moment it was gone. She traced his broad shoulders and the long muscles of his back, her hands roaming farther and farther until they reached the waist of his jeans. Feeling bolder than she had ever been, she wriggled under him and wrapped her legs around him, so that he might feel the heat that was radiating from her deepest center.

He groaned and sat back, pulling her up with him with one arm around her waist, as if she weighed nothing. He settled her in his lap, pulling her hips flush against his until she thought the friction between them would drive her wild. His hands slipped under her shirt and pulled it smoothly over her head. _Yes,_ Bella cried silently; her hair tumbled down around her shoulders, and Edward watched the silken chestnut strands settle, then tangled his fingers in them, crushing her to him in a kiss that took her breath away.

He pulled back and gazed at her, hunger warring with something like sorrow in his eyes. "So it's to be now, is it?" he whispered.

Bella bit her lip, nodded.

He kissed her once, lightly, on the bitten lip, then shifted his weight forward, laying her back gently on the bed with one hand cradling her head as if she might shatter like glass. He knelt above her, bending to press his lips beneath her ear in a cold, open-mouthed kiss. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," he murmured in her ear, and her breath caught in her throat. He slid lower and kissed the arch of her collarbone, easing the strap of her bra down off her shoulder. "Old time is still a-flying." His fingertips skimmed across her stomach, and he kissed the swell of her breast above the edge of her bra. "And this same flower that smiles today –" His fingers slid over the satin, then under it, and fire lanced straight through Bella, and she arched against him. He pulled back and looked at her flushed face, at the rosy nipple peeking above the pink fabric. "My God, Bella, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

He leaned forward, and his lips closed around the hard peak of her nipple, so softly.

She gasped, gripping his arms, lost in the sensations as he pushed the satin away from her other breast and teased the nipple to hardness with his fingers, still lavishing the other with little sucking kisses. She moaned softly, and he smiled against her skin.

And yet – and yet. Even with his fingers and lips moving on her, shocking her with the strangeness of his touch where no one had touched her before, her mind played back the words he had whispered over her. He hadn't finished the poem, and some involuntary memory from a long-ago English class inexorably provided the final line: _Tomorrow will be dying._

His hand had drifted to the button at the waist of her jeans and hesitated there, waiting._ This same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying._ Bella's throat suddenly closed. She _was_ dying, tomorrow, and today, and every day, every instant. All while Edward stood immutable and immobile, a marble statue, just turning his head, just reaching out his hand to brush her cheek as she flew past him. How brief she must seem to him, and how temporary. Even as her body thrilled to his lips and his hands, she closed her eyes in pain against the ache that had settled around her heart.

She twined her fingers in his hair. "Edward," she breathed. In a moment he was lying alongside her again, and she opened her eyes to his face, perfect and unchanging. She knew she must do something or else burst into tears. She kissed his shoulder, and he let her roll him over until, with more confidence than she felt, she straddled his hips and knelt over him.

He was too beautiful, lying there looking up at her. Her heart would break just for the bronze-dark hair on the creamy pillowcase, the gemstone eyes, the half-smile playing on his lips. She was barely breathing as she reached behind herself and unclasped her bra, letting the scraps of satin slide down her arms and away, watching his eyes as they flickered down over her body. She knelt up and unzipped her jeans, working her way awkwardly out of the denim and tossing them on the floor. She straddled him again, his hands sliding up the outside of her bare thighs until they rested on her hips. She turned her attention to the buttons of his fly. Her eyes went to the bulge there, the strange evidence of his otherness, familiar but new, expected yet alien. Her fingers brushed over it as she worked the buttons, and his body tensed. When she looked back at his face he was no longer smiling, eyes dark with desire.

"Bella," he murmured, "we can still stop."

_ But the rosebud is dying_. She knew now, with an intuition that throbbed to her core, that this was the time, and that she could enslave him, body and soul. She leaned down toward him and felt the sharp intake of his breath as her hair brushed over his chest, as her breasts pressed lightly into him. "I don't want to stop," she breathed warm into his ear, then slid back along his body, settling back against his hips and pressing herself against the new, strange hardness there.

A low moan broke from Edward and he gripped her hips, lifting her briefly to the side while he wrestled with his jeans, then they were gone and he pulled her over him once more. The fire was waking again in her, echoing his, centered where she straddled him, and she whimpered at the pressure, grinding helplessly against what was only separated from her by two thin layers of fabric. His hands slid upward over her, tangled briefly in her hair, then, with swift surety and surprising gentleness, stroked over her breasts. His touch was ice and fire together, and she cried out, her head tipping back.

"Oh God, Bella," he whispered.

His eyes were dark and hooded as he pulled her down, capturing her mouth with his, rolling her over again. She found herself looking up at him, and his face was utterly open, desire and anxiousness and delight and unbelief chasing each other across his features. "I can't… I can't believe you're…" he whispered.

"Just kiss me," she whispered back.

Time had no meaning in the delirium of skin on skin. His hands roamed across her body, and she felt that each nerve ending was a hair trigger, needing only the slightest touch to set her on fire. He was exquisitely responsive to her, sighing and moaning against her mouth as her hands traced the strong planes of his body. She felt wild and exultant under his hands and his mouth, and she squirmed under him, seeking desperately either to ease or intensify the dull throb between her legs, yearning for his corresponding parts.

All at once he stilled, his hand gripping hers. "Bella," he whispered, and guided her hand down to the strange hardness that pushed against the fabric of his boxer shorts.

She bit her lip and gently stroked the long shaft through the thin cotton. Edward watched her eyes, her mouth. Before she could lose her nerve, she slipped her hand under the waistband of his shorts and circled him with her fingers, then stroked once lightly, up toward the head. He took a shuddering breath, pupils dilating into pools of blackness within the gold. The skin was icy but velvety and smooth, silk over iron.

"Is this – is this ok?" she asked breathlessly.

He nodded, eyes locked on hers, full of need and wariness.

She explored him, pushing his boxers down with her free hand, and he rolled away briefly and worked them off. When he pressed himself against her again, she sought him with her hand and took a firmer grip, stroking the heavy ridge with her fingertips, rubbing the slit in the head, spreading the cool bead of liquid there. He hissed, his eyes closing, bending his head to her throat, to her breast.

Bella whimpered and then his hands were roving downward, down her ribs, down her belly, taut with her breathlessness. One hand traced maddening little circles on her hip, inching across her lower belly, while he nudged her legs apart with his knee, and she opened to him. Infinitesimally slowly, he crept his fingers down over the silken fabric, until he cupped her most secret parts in his hand. Bella stopped breathing, and they hung together, suspended, and then his fingers moved against the aching bundle of nerves, and she melted under him.

And his fingers were sliding under the elastic and she raised her hips so he could pull them down her legs, and she was naked before him as she had never been for anyone, and he was kneeling between her legs in the afternoon light, and he was Apollo and Lancelot and David with his sling and all the heroes of all the stories, and she was Eve with the bite of apple between her lips, opening her eyes for the first time. And there was such joy in his face, and such pain, for her, for her, for her.

"You're so beautiful," Edward said.

She reached for him.

He fell into her arms, all his skin against all her skin, and she curled her legs around him, fitting her softness against his hardness, her heat against his ice. His hand crept down between their bodies and stroked through her damp curls, opening her delicate folds. She cried out softly when his fingers dipped inside her, spreading the slick wetness over her skin, and he danced around the center of her need until she shook helplessly under him. She was overwhelmed; it was too much and not enough, together. The waves of warmth threatened to swamp her, and she was almost afraid, not knowing if she would arise the same person after such a baptism.

Now. "Edward," she whispered against his skin. "I'm ready."

He pulled back and looked into her eyes, and whatever he saw there must have answered all his questions, because his fingers were gone and she felt instead the cool blunt head of him rubbing through the slick folds of her skin. He took a breath in, closed his eyes, and pushed the head inside her. Bella's instinct took over and her hips arched up toward him, welcoming him.

Then a barrier, and a tearing, and a flash of pain. She winced, recoiling, and he immediately stilled his movement. "Am I hurting you?" he murmured, bending to kiss her neck.

She shook her head, trembling. "Just go slowly," she whispered. She breathed deeply, trying to relax, forcing her muscles to release by sheer will. With a groan of desperation he began to move again, his whole body tense. She clung to him, anchoring herself in the coiled strength in the muscles of his shoulders and arms, accommodating him as he penetrated her.

"Oh God," he moaned. "You're so warm – oh Bella –"

Bella whimpered as he slid deeper inside her, pushing farther and farther until she thought she would break in half, riding the line between pleasure and pain. _This is it,_ she thought, half-coherently. _I'm giving myself to him._ At last his hips pressed fully into hers and they were utterly joined. He paused there, motionless, but the strangeness was more than she could bear, and the tension stretched until she thought she might scream.

"Edward," she cried, and he began to move.

Her breath came in shallow gasps as he slid slowly back and then forward again. With each pass he pressed against her deepest places, and she rocked back against the pillows. The pain subsided until it was only a dull reminder, and the piercing cold of him began to warm to her flesh.

Through the haze of adrenaline and newness, she watched his face. His eyes were shut tightly, the muscles of his jaw working as he clenched his teeth. Their bodies had found a slow steady rhythm, but she was distracted, watching Edward in his obvious labors to be careful with her. He held his weight up on his elbows and knees and kept his eyes firmly shut. _He's holding himself back_, she thought desperately. _He's keeping himself from me._

The tightness was back in her throat. "Edward," she whispered suddenly, even before she herself knew she would speak. He stilled instantly, lowering his head to nuzzle at her neck. She lifted her hands to his head and pulled him up to face her, but his eyes were still closed. "Edward, you can't pretend I'm not here." He made an inarticulate sound of protest, half-hearted. A throb of panic crept into her voice. "Please let go – let yourself feel it."

"I'll hurt you if I do." His voice would break her heart, the fear and pain and desire tangled in his throat.

"You won't," she whispered, almost in tears. "I know you won't. Edward, please." Longing for the weight of him, she pressed herself up toward him, tilting her hips up to him, taking him in as deeply as she could.

His eyes opened at last, the great pupils dilated black, and with a convulsive shudder he inhaled deeply. Bella realized belatedly with a thrill of something almost like terror that he had been holding his breath. But the scent of her seemed to send him over the edge.

"Bella – I can't – I can't –" he almost sobbed.

"Go," she whispered.

That was her last conscious thought, for he was thrusting in earnest now, his strokes powerful and purposeful. She was swept along in the maelstrom of his urgency until she found herself again on the precipice of blinding pleasure and pain. Heart racing, she clung to him, matching him in his need, gasping as he drove her to new heights.

Then all at once his breathing was ragged and his body convulsed against her, inside her. The pain suddenly stabbed through her again and Bella cried out, but then it was over, his movements slowing, his rapid breath subsiding. She buried her face against his shoulder, eyes closed, trembling in his wake. Her thoughts were a confused flurry but she let herself lie still against him, the enormity of what they had just done pressing down on her.

Edward moved first, pulling out of her in a fluid movement. She gingerly unwrapped her legs from his waist, eyes still closed, feeling the first protests from hip joints unused to such exercise. Edward was pushing himself up and she reached for him, expecting to feel his arms around her. But abruptly he was gone and she opened her eyes in surprise, feeling suddenly cold.

He knelt between her legs, sitting back on his heels, studying her. Bella felt suddenly very exposed under his gaze and made a movement to reach for the bedsheet with an embarrassed laugh, twisting her hips away from him, but his hands stopped her. She looked questioningly up into his face and realized with a jolt that the eyes looking down at her were flat, black, empty.

"Edward?" she asked uncertainly.

He said nothing, but moved slowly, so slowly. She felt a light touch, a finger, no more, between her legs. He raised his hand, looking with a curious detachment at the tip of his index finger. It was smeared with blood – her blood.

Bella's stomach dropped.

With the same agonizing slowness, Edward raised his finger to his mouth, wrapped his lips around the tip. His eyes closed.

_ Vampire_, whispered a voice, long-suppressed, in Bella's mind. Her heart began to race.

His eyes slowly opened, and locked on hers. The monster flashed behind the blackness. His beautiful features twisted inexorably into a predator's snarl.

Her limbs felt numb and she tried to move slowly, but she couldn't control herself. Some ancient flight instinct seized her and she scrambled clumsily away from him toward the head of the bed. And in a movement of feral grace he crouched and made a spring for her, pinioning her to the mattress, his body crushing hers once more but in a very different way. Her head crashed against the headboard, and his hand came up around her throat, forcing her head back. His teeth were against the side of her neck, under her jaw; she could feel their razor edges, and his cold breath hissing against her skin.

_This is the end,_ thought Bella, her traitor heart flying in its final moments.

For an instant, time stood still.

And then the hand at her throat began to shake and the razor teeth retreated. Edward uttered a strangled cry and suddenly his weight was gone from her. She struggled upright, panting, as adrenaline and fear roiled sickeningly in her stomach. She couldn't get a proper breath. Her shaking hand flew to her throat, where she found nothing but a patch of his saliva – his venom – on her skin.

Edward was crouched as far away from her as the room would allow, his whole body trembling, his icy pallor even whiter than usual. His flat black eyes held horror and revulsion – and yet hunger.

Even through her panic, Bella's heart melted and she moved to go to him. "Edward –"

He jerked himself to standing. "Don't come near me."

She winced at the raw anguish in his voice. "Edward, I –"

"Get out of here, Bella," he growled.

"But I –"

Fury and self-loathing snapped in him and his eyes blazed into black supernovas. "GET OUT!" he roared, the cords standing out on his neck, and he seized the edge of the massive bookshelves beside him and yanked them off the wall. Books and cds flew wildly as the shelves crashed down, jewel cases shattering, discs littering the floor like silver scales.

Bella tore a sheet from the bed and fled toward the door. Behind her, Edward let out a guttural roar of pure pain, like a wounded lion. As she wrenched the door open and stumbled into the hall, she heard a deafening crash. She didn't look back to see what he'd thrown through the wall of windows. The sound might have been all the glass in the world breaking, or his heart.

***

**Author's note:**

**This is an Eclipse-era canon fic, basically my version of how I wanted the books to go. If you're interested in my explanation of the reasons for this story, go see my profile – I'm not going to bore you here by writing a long note. Suffice it to say, I hope you stick with me for this little journey. There will definitely be angst, and there will possibly be blood (mwa ha ha), and also, I hope, some redemption. Everything here belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Fathomless love to my sister and beta and partner-in-crime, mllebojangles.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Everything belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Love to mllebojangles, the beyond-beta.**

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2

Bella sat curled in the farthest corner of the Cullens' upstairs bathroom. She had wrapped the bedsheet around herself but the thin fabric did nothing to protect her from the cold of the white marble tile or to stop the shivering that came from a much deeper chill. The sounds of destruction from the other end of the long hallway had died away, but she didn't dare to go back to Edward's bedroom – nor could she bear to go any farther away from him.

Her mind whirled. _This can't be happening. This can't be happening._ Edward had attacked her. But he couldn't have attacked her – he loved her. He had loved her enough to suppress his instincts and his appetite, to protect her from himself. He had promised never to hurt her, and he never had – until today. The back of her head throbbed where he had slammed her into the headboard, and she could still feel his icy hand at her throat like the memory of a nightmare.

_ I pushed him_, she thought in agony. _He would never have let it go so far if I hadn't urged him into it._ Guilt and terror swooped dizzyingly in her stomach. And yet… and yet… The memory of his hands and lips on her skin, the exquisite strangeness of him moving inside her, was enough to bring the desire flooding through her again. And then the image of him crouched to spring flashed before her eyes, his face twisted and unrecognizable, and her thoughts spiraled away in panic. She longed to go to him, to seek the safe harbor of his arms, but for the first time since that sunlit afternoon in Edward's meadow -- what felt like a lifetime ago, now -- she was afraid of him.

Something caught the corner of her eye and she jumped, startled out of her numbness, seeing figures in the doorway. It was only Alice and Jasper. The fear drained away, but she found herself flushing – _caught in flagrante delicto on top of everything else, wearing nothing but a sheet –_ and pulled the fabric more tightly around herself. She tried to stammer a greeting, an explanation, anything, but the sight of them stopped her. They both stood unnaturally still. Alice's eyes were glazed, as if she were drugged.

It was, uncharacteristically, Jasper who broke the silence. "Are you unwell, Bella?" he asked softly, moving forward too smoothly for her eyes to follow.

She sat up straighter and unconsciously tried to straighten out the tousled mess of her hair. "I'm fine," she replied, struggling to keep her voice light. "Just a little shaken up, that's all."

Jasper clearly wasn't convinced – there was concern in his dark eyes, as well as something else Bella couldn't place. "Did Edward hurt you?" he asked. How had he gotten closer still without her noticing? Her thoughts were slow, as if the air in the bathroom were suddenly thick and fuzzy.

"No, no, of course not," she protested, hearing the wobble of untruth in her voice, knowing he heard it too. He had never voluntarily come this close to her before, and was now actually crouching down on the tiles in front of her. Alice stood more motionless than a statue in the doorway. Something was wrong here, something strange that should have disturbed her, yet Bella couldn't bring herself to mind, not when such gentleness, such serenity radiated from Jasper's every move. She realized that she had never really taken the time to appreciate his own particular golden beauty, surrounded as he was by his glorious family. The sweetness of his smile seemed to still her pounding heart.

"He shouldn't have hurt you," Jasper murmured, sliding himself beside Bella, wrapping one arm around her shoulders with all the tenderness of a concerned brother. Bella sighed, the calmness claiming her at last. How kind Jasper was, how thoughtful and protective, how sweet to be worried about her. He wouldn't let anything bad happen to her. She was suddenly sleepy with relief and her head rolled back against his shoulder. His free hand came up and stroked her exposed throat, and that was fine, and natural, and when he tipped her head gently away and bent slowly toward her, that was fine too, and she smiled, welcoming him.

Many things happened almost simultaneously. Alice gasped in the doorway, one tiny sound, nearly imperceptible. In almost the same moment there was a horrifying roar, an ugly animal sound of rage, that shattered the thick cocoon around Bella's mind. Someone tore Jasper away from her side, sending her sprawling into the side of the bathtub, and there were sickening crashes from the other end of the room. She sat up unsteadily, shaking her head as if she could dispel the webs Jasper had woven around her.

Edward crouched before her in a protective fighting stance, facing away down the length of the bathroom. Jasper was climbing to his feet, shattered tile and glass littering the floor around him. Edward must have hurled him bodily across the room. _Jasper… Jasper almost…_ Bella couldn't even finish the thought.

Jasper's face was twisted into a mask of pure venomous fury. He advanced toward Edward, dropping into a fighter's crouch, his lean body coiled like a spring.

"You would fight me for her?" he hissed.

"You know I would," was Edward's snarled reply.

"Alice!" Jasper snapped. It was a command, though his eyes never left Edward's.

Bella's eyes flew to Alice, still in the doorway. Her hands were over her mouth and her eyes were black and horrified. She shook her head mutely.

"Alice!" Jasper cried again. There was a note of desperation in his voice.

Her hands slipped minutely. "No, Jasper," she whispered, the sound barely carrying to Bella's ears. "I won't. I won't fight my brother for you, not even for..." She stopped, her eyes just short of meeting Bella's. "No."

The fight suddenly went out of Jasper, but the fury in his face redoubled. He straightened up in a flash too fast for sight to follow. "Edward, you are living on the edge of a knife," he hissed icily. "Change her or finish her. You cannot continue to inflict her on us, and you cannot last much longer yourself." And in that instant he was gone, striding out through the bathroom door, snapping in a violent snarl mere fractions of an inch from Alice's wide black eyes. Bella flinched as Jasper roared, already gone down the hallway, "You're tearing this family apart, Edward!"

Edward still stood in front of Bella, not relaxing his protective stance. Alice seemed frozen in horror, and then she whispered, "Forgive me, Edward. Bella, I… Forgive me." And then she was gone as well.

The front door slammed. The house was silent. Only then did Edward relax, straighten up, and turn.

Bella was trembling. Her eyes traveled slowly up from the floor, strewn with broken tile and slivered glass, up Edward's pale frame, hastily dressed in boxer shorts and his unbuttoned shirt. She was terrified of what she would find in his face. If she had to see one more predatory glare where she thought to find love or comfort, she thought something in her might snap irreparably.

Instead in his eyes she saw anguish, and self-disgust, and fear, and fathomless remorse. Her eyes blurred at the sight of him, but as soon as he saw her tears his face twisted in pain and he collapsed to his knees, dropping forward until his forehead grazed the floor, twining one hand in the edge of the sheet.

"I'm so sorry, Bella," he said brokenly. "I'm so very sorry and I will never forgive myself, never, never…"

Bella said nothing. Everything was frozen inside her. She clamped her hands together to try to stop them shaking so badly.

Edward went on, not raising his head from the floor. "I love you more than I can even tell you, and you gave yourself so trustingly, and I turned on you like an _animal–_" the ferocity of his self-loathing splintered his voice into shards – "and then I left you completely vulnerable…" He made a sound in his throat that was half a sob, half a growl. "I don't deserve ever to see you again. I don't deserve to breathe the same air you breathe." Bella couldn't bear it. She reached out to stroke his hair, but as if he felt her approach, he jerked away and leapt to his feet, pacing the room, heedless of the debris on the floor. Bella retreated, huddling farther into the sheet, hugging her knees to her chest, trying to make herself smaller, to concentrate the fragile warmth left in her body. She couldn't deal with the first thing that had happened – her mind kept edging around an image of Edward with bloodlust in his eyes, and veering away in panic – so she focused instead on what she could understand.

She managed at last to make a sound. "Jasper?" she said, a crack in her voice.

Edward paused and looked at her, something like pity mixing with the anguish on his face. "Jasper." He shook his head. "He's not as strong as the rest of us, not as good at denying…" He stopped, closed his eyes, continued. "Truly, he never stood a chance. It was like sitting a starving man down at a king's feast." He opened his eyes and saw the blank confusion on her face, and gave a bitter half-laugh. "Oh, Bella, surely you must realize. Jasper and Alice arrived at precisely the right moment to receive the full brunt of your smell – the height of your arousal – and your fear." He spat the word out with disgust. "It's a very… _potent_…combination. There's no possible way he could have resisted."

Bella laid her head on her knees, looking away. "And Alice?" It came out almost as a croak.

"She fought it," said Edward softly, crouching down before her again. "She fought it harder than she has had to fight anything in a long, long time."

"But she wanted my blood too."

Edward's long silence was affirmation enough. At last he dropped to the floor in something like defeat. "She wanted you alive more," he said. He leaned back against the edge of the bathtub, propping his elbows on his bent knees. "She was fighting so hard that I couldn't see her thoughts. And Jasper was masking his mind in the same way he was muddling yours. And I was so wrapped up in my own anger that I wasn't paying attention." There was no fury left in his voice, only an infinite fatigue. "Otherwise I would have been here sooner."

A new sorrow, piercing her. "Oh, Edward," she whispered, raising her head to look at him, "your room, all your music…"

He shook his head. "All those things can be replaced. I can't replace you."

She cleared her throat. There was something she needed to ask him, but she knew she was on dangerous ground, the way her mind kept swerving away from some central question. "I thought," she said, trying to speak very clearly, feeling that her tongue was turning to clay, "that you said it had gotten easier. Being with me."

Again the bitter laughter. "Easier?" One long hand came up to cover his eyes. "More familiar, maybe. But never easier. I've heard that people can grow accustomed to torture – but still it is torture, and they feel every minute of it nonetheless. No. It never gets easier. And I –" He stopped, grimacing. "My defenses were compromised."

So it was her. She had pushed him over the edge, shattered his self-defense, and he had lost control, just as he'd said he would. And when he'd seen her blood, his inexorable instincts took over. Always it came back to her blood, the very essence of her life-force, the one thing she couldn't give him – the traitor in her that called out to the predator in Edward, when every other part of her longed only for his love. Her hands suddenly shook with a wild desire to claw at her wrists, her neck, to get rid of whatever poison was in her that caused Jasper to turn on her, that froze Alice like a statue, that put the black frenzy in Edward's eyes…

She looked at him and found him staring back at her, a perfect mirror of her horror and despair, as if his mind had been following the same track as hers. "Bella, you cannot blame yourself for this," he said earnestly, leaning toward her, but still, she noticed, keeping himself carefully out of arm's reach. "You are the only one here who isn't to blame. You are the only normal thing in any of this."

"But my being normal almost got me killed." _Twice,_ she thought, but didn't say. "My being _human_ made Alice and Jasper want to attack me. And now you're never going to touch me again, because I'm human. Because of my blood." Her voice was rising and she couldn't control it. "We're back where we started, aren't we? With you afraid to come near me?" Still icy, still shivering, she uncurled suddenly and made to move toward him, arms open to embrace him as she had a thousand times, yet he jerked backward away from her. As if he were the one who had to be afraid.

"Bella," he moaned, pain etched deeply on his face, "I attacked you. I almost killed you. I came closer than I ever have since the first day I smelled your blood."

That was it. That was the crux, which she had been circling. Her Edward – her beloved Edward – had almost killed her, at her most vulnerable moment. All the fear and shock that she had been suppressing overflowed with violent suddenness. The first sob tore through her before she could bite it back, and more followed, racking her body. She was aware of Edward watching her in helpless anguish, torn between his desire to comfort her and his fear of nearness. She was lost in her grief – for her life so narrowly saved at such a cost – for Jasper and Alice and whatever had been broken between them and Edward – for her own innocence and heedlessness, now irreparably fractured. For the memory of Edward's face looking up at her from the pillows, for the love and wonder in his eyes.

Nothing mattered as much as that. "You'll never touch me again," she choked out between sobs. "And you're going to go away again and leave me. And I can't bear it, Edward. I can't." Tear-blinded, she crawled toward him, limbs tangling in the sheet. He let out a groan of defeat, and then his arms were around her, pulling her into his lap, into the safe haven of his embrace. She abandoned herself, sobbing against his chest.

He stroked her hair and made shushing noises, but the sobs only worsened. Somewhere within the storm, Bella watched herself from inside an icy stillness. She would never be warm again.

Her hands were numb, and her face. She thought she might shake herself to pieces. Edward looked down at her with increasing alarm. "Bella... Bella, please..."

His arms, his chest, his lips against her hair, all ice. "Cold –" she stammered through lips of clay. "I'm so cold..."

Edward's face crumpled and he collapsed against the edge of the bathtub, swearing under his breath. He reached back over the side of the tub and turned on the shower, then climbed over into the hot water, awkwardly lifting Bella in his arms. She was only aware of the heat now pouring over her, soaking through the sheet still wrapped around her, mingling with the tears that ran freely down her face. Edward held her tightly in the steaming spray as the violence of her sobs subsided, and the heat of the water seemed to give his flesh the warmth of human skin.

* * *

Bella sat on the edge of her bed, pulling a comb unthinkingly through her wet hair, over and over again. Edward had calmed her down enough to manage the drive – _you shouldn't be in this house right now,_ he had said – and she had somehow gotten home without really looking at the roads. He had retrieved her clothes from the wreckage of his room without letting her in; she had noticed his embarrassment and hadn't pressed him on it, although she had seen shredded fabric and what looked like mattress springs spilling through his door into the hallway.

_ His bed – our bed. Used once and destroyed._ She shook her head and put down the comb.

Once safely home, she had left a note for Charlie on the kitchen table: _not feeling well – I'm going to sleep early_. He would find it when he got home from his late shift, and if she was lucky he wouldn't feel the need to check in on her. If she felt hungry later she could sneak down for some supper after he went to bed.

She couldn't imagine feeling hungry just now, but at least she didn't feel cold anymore. Even though Edward had held her in the Cullens' bathtub for what had felt like hours, she had headed straight for the shower once she got home, depleting the house's small water heater.

Standing under the hot water, hugging herself in the steam, Bella had found herself surprisingly calm. Her world needed some restructuring, that was all. Edward was a vampire. _Edward is a vampire. How could I have forgotten? _ It seemed impossible, but she _had_ forgotten. Now, sitting in her half-lit room, she forced herself to think the words again, to think about all the words. Of course she had never forgotten his icy skin, his speed and strength, his state of perpetual wakefulness. But she had repressed thoughts of his – _say it, Bella –_ appetite all too easily.

He was a predator, and she was his prey, and try as he might that would never change.

They would have to find a way to deal with this. He would learn how to touch her again, or she would learn to live without his touch. Her throat tightened, threatening tears again, but she forced herself to face the thought of a future lived in such a delicate balance. The edge of a knife, Jasper had said.

And if they slipped? If the balance couldn't hold? To one side, death. She had always been able to discount this before, claiming reflexively that Edward could never hurt her. After today she could no longer pretend that it was true. If she pushed him too far again, if he couldn't stop himself like he had today, it would all be over. She could bear this, she thought, if not for the knowledge of the grief and guilt that would certainly destroy Edward.

And to the other side of the knife... _Change her, or finish her._ Changed. Bella got up from the bed and slowly approached the mirror above her dresser. Her fingers crept up to the sides of her face. She tried to imagine her skin pale and cold as marble, her features honed into the eerie beauty the Cullens all wore so well, and shivered uneasily. She couldn't imagine herself as a vampire, no more than she could imagine Charlie as one, or any of her friends from school. She was simply too human.

Would she do it, if it were required of her? Watching her reflection, she drifted, imagining the bite – the searing pain – the transformation. She shivered again. The foreknowledge of pain frightened her, but only in a general way. What terrified her was the thought of awakening as a vampire. Who could say whether her mind would stay the same while her body transformed? How much of her, of Bella, would remain, and how much would be lost under the beauty and the strength and the bloodlust? Her human body was maddening, hopelessly soft and fragile, but it was hers and she had learned to live with it. Beauty and speed and strength – not to mention immortality – were fine things to wish for, but facing the prospect of an unchanging eternity as a creature that thirsted endlessly for human blood was another matter entirely.

_ Blood._ In spite of everything, she found herself imagining it – the rust smell, the coppery taste, the hot liquid running over her tongue, down her chin. And not a little blood like a bleeding gum or a paper cut instinctively brought to her mouth and sucked, either, but thick mouthfuls of heart's-blood. The smell of charnelhouses, of butchery. Her stomach churned. She couldn't face it. She couldn't.

She heard a soft sound behind her and jumped, her overworked heart leaping into her throat as she spun around. Edward was silhouetted in the dark of her open window, half in the room, his face uncertain. His approach was usually silent and not nearly so timid. _He didn't want to frighten me, so he alerted me that he was here._ Bella's heart twisted.

His eyes searched her face, almost sheepishly. "May I come in?"

She moved toward him like a snapped string. "Of course, Edward," she said. "You know you don't have to ask." She seized his hand as he climbed through the window. He seemed to flinch from the touch, and she dropped his hand again.

They stood facing each other awkwardly. He cleared his throat – _a residual human habit, or one picked up from me?_ Bella wondered – and at last he said, "Are you feeling all right?"

Bella nodded jerkily. She wasn't shaking anymore, and while tears were still perilously close to the surface, she had enough of a handle on herself to keep them at bay. He ran a hand distractedly through his hair. She found herself watching the mobile lines of his mouth. _Blood. He thirsts for it._

She looked down hurriedly, casting about for something to say. "Have you heard from Alice and Jasper?" she asked desperately.

His eyes searched her face. "They're gone," he said. "As far as I can tell. I haven't felt anything from either of them since this afternoon."

Bella chewed her lip. Another silence. She asked, "Does anyone else know?"

Edward nodded slowly, once. "Esme came home while I was cleaning up my room. And Carlisle needed to know where Jasper and Alice were." Bella looked up at him, stricken. "I didn't tell them everything – just what they needed to know. Mostly they were worried about you."

She had thought she was beyond tears, but her throat tightened anyway, and her eyes prickled. "I hope you told them I'm fine."

His brows were drawn together. "Are you?" When she didn't say anything, he twisted his hands together wretchedly. "Bella, I..." he began haltingly. "I'm so sorry about what happened today. I keep saying that, like an idiot, but it's true – it's the only thing that's true."

Truth. She felt it flare through her. "I'm sorry how it ended," she said. "I'm not sorry about how it began. I don't regret it one bit, Edward."

She could almost see the thoughts chase themselves across his face – he felt responsible, he was still furious and still loathed himself. But the fire was gone. He deflated, almost visibly. "I know. I know."

There was another silence, filling the gulf between them. "So where does that leave us now?" she asked at last.

"I don't know, Bella." His voice was haggard, betraying the wear that his ageless face could not. "I do know that I will do anything I can to keep you, and to keep you safe." He looked down. "I would do anything for you."

Bella had the strangest feeling that he was only half with her, that if she made one false move he would be gone. She closed her eyes – the better for walking across chasms – and took a step toward him. She put up her hands and found his chest, leaned her cheek against it. His arms crept hesitantly around her. "Stay here tonight," she said. "Stay with me."

They lay on her bed and she curled against his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder. And all night long she didn't dream once, but floated in an emptiness that was like a gift, while his open eyes searched the darkness.

When she woke she was alone. The light filtering into her room was soft gold – sunrise, Bella realized. The clouds must have lifted.

She sat up and looked around. There was a folded sheet of paper balanced on top of her alarm clock, a torn page from the notebook that lay open on her desk. She reached out and took it, unfolding it.

_Bella -_

_I have to go away for a time._  
_I will come back._

_Forgive me._

_Edward_

Her first thought was, _He didn't have to sign it._ She would recognize his handwriting anywhere, and besides, who else could it be? She traced over the signature with her fingertip. Another gift.

Her second thought: _He's gone._ She had been here before. Here was the precipice, the yawning abyss. And just as suddenly, she knew that she would not take that route again. He would come back – he had said so.

So she got up, and got dressed, and did a load of laundry, and did her physics homework. And the next day was Monday. At lunchtime she loaded up a tray, resolutely walked past the Cullens' empty table, ignored Jessica's curious stares, sat down next to Angela, and said, "Hi."


	3. Chapter 3

**Everything belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Love to mllebojangles, and to you for reading.**

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3

The days passed. Edward's absence was an ache in her chest, but it was one she could bear, if she held thoughts of him at a safe distance while she needed to be thinking about other things like school or talking to Charlie. She thought of him perpetually, of course – his ghost haunted her room, her car, every corner of the school – but with each memory, Bella amended firmly in her mind, _He's coming back._

About Alice, she wasn't so sure. There had been no sign of her or Jasper. Although Rosalie, Emmett, and Jasper had graduated the previous spring, bringing the formidable Cullen presence at the school down to only two, the disappearance of those two excited avid interest among gossip-starved students. Carlisle must have worked quickly, however, because there was already a story floating around by the time Bella had to face her first awkward question about Edward.

"I heard they have a great-uncle or something who's absolutely rolling in it," Jessica's voice had come floating down the lunch table that first day. "And he took them sailing around the world on practically no notice. Just yanked them out of school."

"Like they don't already miss enough," Eric had commented.

"Too bad they didn't take you along, Bella!" That had been Lauren. Jessica had giggled. Only Angela had had the good grace to look chagrined.

Bella had pretended to ignore them, but secretly she was fervently thanking Carlisle for sparing her the necessity of explaining it to everyone. And when her classmates found that she didn't have much more information about the Cullens than they did, they soon stopped asking her.

Angela was turning out to be an unexpected blessing. Unlike the others, she seemed to bear Bella no grudge for abandoning them for the Cullens' company the year before. Angela's relationship with Ben had cooled off and ended amicably enough, and from outward appearances she was still her happy quiet self. But now that Bella had the time and inclination to truly focus on her, she saw that Angela felt herself to be on the social outskirts of the crowd, and the loneliness pained her deeply.

Both girls were naturally reserved, but under Bella's unobtrusive influence Angela seemed to blossom, and over time, Bella found herself beginning to radiate something back. She also found herself wishing she hadn't wasted so much time before bothering to become friends with Angela.

She caught herself. _What a thought. It wasn't wasted time when I was with him._ She caught herself again. _He's coming back._

All considered, she managed her loneliness with surprising ease, making it through day after day with her loss buried deep where no one could see it. Night was harder, however. She steeled herself before turning out the light, but once she lay down, her eyes were drawn to the empty dim square of the window, and the wordless ache arose in her. Those were the moments that she thought she might spin apart into all her separate atoms if she couldn't feel his arms holding her together.

It was a Saturday, two weeks to the day after she'd seen him last. Bella was at the kitchen table, eating leftover lasagna for lunch and absorbed in her assigned novel for English class, when Charlie clomped through the room.

"Mail's here," he said, tossing a few envelopes in front of her.

She grunted noncommittally. He took a cookie from a box in the cabinet and disappeared into the living room.

Bella sighed and, propping her book open against her plate, flipped idly through the envelopes with one hand. Most were from colleges, and she knew that if she opened them, they would all say roughly the same thing – visit our website, schedule an interview, send your application. She pushed them aside with the uneasy knowledge that she was putting off thinking about the future, and that sooner or later she would have to decide what she wanted to do after graduation.

And a brightly colored postcard slid out of the pile. Bella picked it up. It was a picture of an aquamarine ocean, with rounded hilly islands poking out of it, and written across it were the words, "Rio de Janeiro." She turned it over.

One word only:

_Searching_

Her heart began to pound. She clutched the postcard with both hands, and _Tess of the D'Urbervilles _slid unheeded into her plate. The postcard was from Edward.

* * *

The woman at the hospital information desk looked at Bella over the rims of her glasses. "Can I help you, honey?"

"Yes," Bella said. "I'd like to speak with Dr. Cullen. If he's available."

A few minutes later she was walking down a hall lined with offices, her hand thrust deep into her jacket pocket, gripping Edward's postcard. She had had enough of self-denial – she was bringing her forced exile from the Cullen family to an end.

Room 256 – _Dr. Carlisle Cullen_, read the nameplate on the door. She steeled herself and raised her fist to knock, but before she made contact the door swung open and there was Carlisle.

Bella actually stumbled a half step backward. It had been two weeks since she had seen a vampire, any vampire, and somehow she was unprepared for him – her memory had blunted the edges, had shied away from the impossibility of his paleness, his beauty, the silken fluidity of his every movement. Now it was as if she were seeing one of them for the first time. _Predator_, her instincts shrieked. She knew that her face had gone traitorously pale.

Carlisle saw it too, and something – resignation? sorrow? – flashed through his eyes and was gone. He smiled his least-threatening smile. "Bella. Marilyn called and said you were on your way up. Please come in."

Bella swallowed hard and followed him into the office, glad for once of the small-town life that made anonymity impossible. Somehow it made it easier that Carlisle was expecting her. Of course the receptionist would have known who she was. Perhaps she even had theories as to why Bella was coming up to visit her boyfriend's father. Her absent boyfriend.

_ He's coming back_, Bella thought.

Carlisle pulled out his desk chair, and Bella perched on the edge of the chair opposite, like a patient at a consultation. Carlisle looked at her almost warily, and she plunged in.

"I got a postcard from Edward today," she said, pulling the card out of her pocket. "He's in Rio de Janeiro – or at least he was. He says he's searching for something."

Carlisle nodded, taking the card. "We received one as well, from Buenos Aires," he said. "It arrived yesterday."

Bella chewed her lip. It was a profound relief to be talking about Edward, at last. "What do you think he could be looking for?" she asked.

He frowned. "I'd tell you if I knew, Bella," he said. "He didn't tell me before he left. In fact, he didn't tell me he was leaving that night – he left me a note where I wouldn't find it until morning. I had to move quickly to inform the school in time."

Bella smiled wryly. "Thank you for that, by the way," she said. "It made my life a little easier, not having to explain to everyone."

Carlisle nodded. "I hoped it might take some of the pressure off you." He was watching her carefully, and looked as if he were about to speak, but stopped himself. Instead he looked down at the postcard still in his hands, and gave it back to her, scrupulously avoiding touching her fingers. "As for Edward, I don't know what sort of quest he's on. But you should know that he's not reckless, no matter how desperate he may have seemed before he left. He can take care of himself and keep himself hidden. I have no fears of his being harmed in any way."

Bella felt some tension relax out of her shoulders. It was hard to imagine anything or anyone hurting Edward if he were determined to protect himself, short of his running afoul of a particularly vicious vampire gang, but it was good to hear Carlisle's reassurance nonetheless. But if Carlisle didn't know what Edward was looking for, she doubted anyone else would. She frowned at the postcard, turning it over and over as if it might give her more answers.

"To tell the truth, Bella, I'm much more concerned about you," Carlisle continued. She looked up in surprise. "Edward didn't tell me everything that happened the day he left, but he told me enough. I can't help but feel that you have suffered greatly at the hands of my family. We've caused you nothing but ill."

"No, that's not true," Bella burst out. "If anything, it's the other way around. Jasper and Alice are gone because of me. Edward is gone because of me. I'm the one tearing your family apart." She heard the echoes of Jasper's parting words in her own, and clamped her jaw shut tight.

"It's not your fault, Bella, not at all," Carlisle said, leaning forward. "Perhaps we had all grown too complacent. It was too easy, having you around – it was too easy to forget what we are."

"And what we are is fundamentally incompatible," said Bella miserably, the old despair welling up in her.

He shook his head firmly. "I don't believe that. I have worked for three centuries to prove that wrong."

Bella shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. After all this time it was still strange to be reminded of certain aspects of vampire life. Carlisle continued grimly, "By being with you, Edward is trying to do what no other of our kind has done – maintain a relationship with a human. He is sorely testing himself, but I believe that he is strong enough to do what he sets his mind to. In a way, he is stronger than any of us." For a moment, Carlisle smiled in pure fatherly pride. "If he thinks he can find something somewhere that will make this easier, then I believe him."

Bella nodded slowly. Carlisle's words lightened the dark absence in her ever so slightly.

He stood. "I'm sorry to say I have patients I must see. But I am truly glad you came to see me, Bella. We miss you. The house is very quiet now and Esme longs to have everyone together again."

Bella stood as well. "Rosalie and Emmett must be pretty bored."

Amusement flashed across his face. "I think Rosalie doesn't mind so much. Emmett, though, is furious at Edward and Jasper – he was never good at entertaining himself, and he's lost his partners in crime. When they come home I suspect there'll be hell to pay."

A wistful voice in Bella said, _If they come home_. Was Carlisle thinking that too? He was trying so hard to hold his family together. Feeling guilty for her part in this, fearing his answer, she asked, "Have you heard from Alice and Jasper?"

The line reappeared between his brows. "Not a word." He saw her downcast look, and added, "They will come home when they are ready, Bella. You'll see. Just give it time."

They parted in the hallway, Carlisle off to his rounds, Bella back to the lobby. "Come visit us if you'd like," Carlisle told her. "Esme would love to see you."

Bella nodded noncommittally, thinking that it would be far to much to bear to see the rest of the family. "You'll let me know if you hear anything from Edward?"

"Of course."

Walking across the parking lot to her truck, Bella thought over his words. He at least seemed confident that his family would return to some semblance of normalcy. But for herself and Edward... what could normal possibly be for them? An image flashed unbidden into her mind as she climbed into the truck, of herself and Edward holding hands in the sunlight, and his face had no inhuman glitter, and his hand in hers was warm and yielding. The simple joy in his crooked smile took her breath away. If only they didn't have to deal with any of this. Maybe they'd go to college together. Maybe they'd get married and have children someday. Edward in a cap and gown with his arm around her, posing for snapshots, brandishing their diplomas. Edward in a tuxedo, waiting at the end of the aisle for her. Edward with a sleeping baby in his arms.

Tears blurred her eyes, and she bowed her head until her forehead rested on the steering wheel. That future was closed to her. The path she had chosen spiraled into darkness, and on it she could see no vision of herself.

* * *

Days stretched into weeks, and the postcards came faster now. Bella now found two and sometimes three cards a week tossed in with the envelopes in the mailbox, often at irregular intervals. Lima, Tierra del Fuego, Marrakech, Tripoli, Capetown, Mumbai. After the third card arrived, Bella unearthed a poster-sized world map she'd once used for a geography assignment out of a box of old school materials and tacked it up above her desk, sticking a pin in the map for each postcard. There was no discernible pattern, but when her mind drifted she would spend long minutes of reverie gazing at the constellation of pins. Riyadh, Tashkent, Kathmandu, Phnom Penh, Ulaanbaatar. Sometimes she felt comforted, having reduced the world to a manageable size; sometimes she ached with loneliness, feeling that he was impossibly far away.

The postcards were all unsigned, and each simply said "Searching" or sometimes "Still searching." Bella soon developed a private ritual as each new card arrived, holding it in her hands and concentrating fiercely on it, trying to send her thoughts back along its path: _I miss you. I love you. Come back._

In the meantime she was spending more and more time with Angela. The girls spent hours after school ostensibly doing homework but as often as not their conversations spilled from English and history into less academic matters. Bella found that she could forget her loneliness more easily with Angela than with anyone else, and one evening as she drove back from Angela's house, she thought in wonderment, _Is this what it's like to have normal friends?_

Conversation occasionally strayed toward Edward and the other Cullens, and Bella kept her answers to Angela's hesitant questions as vague as possible. She didn't like lying to her new friend, so instead she was as reticent as possible. Sometimes she could almost feel the curiosity bubbling beneath Angela's carefully nonchalant exterior. She knew she would be equally curious if their positions were reversed, and she asked silent forgiveness with each abrupt or misleading answer she gave.

One afternoon almost two months after Edward's departure, the two girls drove to Bella's house in her truck. Angela was recounting an incident from her math class, which involved the school's star pitcher and a very prickly young teacher, and had Bella shrieking with laughter.

"And then," Angela gasped as they tumbled out of the cab, "Ms. Morris said in that dry sarcastic voice, 'Perhaps you can use the puddle of drool you left on your desk to solve your problem set, since you don't seem to be prepared in any other way.' Jeff couldn't even say anything – just sat there opening and closing his mouth like a fish! Even the other guys on the team were laughing at him!"

Bella leaned against the truck's grille, holding her sides. "Serves him right!" she managed, once she could breathe again. "He's been such a jerk to everyone all year, ever since that ridiculous story in the paper."

"I know!" shrieked Angela. "And then I couldn't believe it when he –"

She suddenly stopped short, all her laughter gone. Bella, surprised, followed her line of sight to the front porch, where a pale, slight figure was unfolding itself from a perch on the top step.

"Hi, Bella," said Alice uncertainly.

Bella's mouth dropped open of its own accord. After all this time, and just at a moment when she was completely unprepared, it seemed impossible that Alice was actually standing in front of her.

Alice came lightly down the steps, and her eyes were guarded. At last she said, with a pleading half-smile, "Well, say something."

Bella jerked into motion. "You're... you're back," she said stupidly. She suddenly became aware that Angela had gone completely still and silent beside her. Bella turned toward her friend, and saw Angela looking warily between her and Alice.

"Alice – you remember Angela, right? From school?" she said hurriedly.

"Sure. Hi." Alice's eyes barely flickered toward Angela.

Bella's questions abruptly overflowed. "When did you get back? Where's Jasper? Have you heard from..." She felt Angela looking curiously at her, and in a flash she remembered the cover story about sailing around the world, and gulped back the rest of her words. "I didn't know when you were coming back," she ended lamely.

"I just arrived today," Alice said. Bella noted the singular with a sinking heart. "But, um," and here she finally looked fully and pointedly at Angela, "can we talk about this inside?"

Angela stiffened beside Bella, and Bella winced. She turned to her friend apologetically. "It's ok," Angela said, two spots of color appearing high on her cheeks. "I'll see you tomorrow, Bella."

"Well, ok," Bella said, torn – Angela was obviously hurt, but she was desperate to talk to Alice. She saw Angela stride down the driveway and realized the other girl didn't have a car. "Wait – can I drive you home?" Her voice twisted.

"No, that's all right," Angela said, turning back to her, not quite meeting her eyes. "It's only a mile or so."

"Good to see you, Andrea," Alice called out. Angela didn't respond.

"It's _Angela,_ Alice," Bella hissed, cringing. Alice shrugged dismissively, leading the way up the porch steps. _I'll call tonight and apologize,_ Bella thought, following Alice inside.

Once safely up in her bedroom, Bella closed the door while Alice hovered uncertainly nearby. Bella perched on the edge of the bed and bombarded her immediately. "Alice, where have you been? Are you ok? Is Jasper back too? Do you know where Edward is?"

She would have continued but Alice shrank back against the door, looking pained. "I'm fine," she said unhappily. "So is Jasper. We just had to be... away... for a little while. And I'm sorry, and I wish I had other news, but I haven't heard anything from Edward."

She was keeping her gaze carefully down, but in the light from the lamp Bella caught a strange flash in her eyes all the same. She got up from the bed and approached Alice. "Are your – Is there something different about your eyes?"

Alice gave a low, defeated chuckle. "I'd hoped you wouldn't notice," she said, raising her gaze slowly to meet Bella's. In the yellowy depths of her irises was an unmistakable dark red tinge.

Unable to stop herself, Bella took a horrified step back. "Have you –" She couldn't even finish the sentence.

Alice nodded miserably. "I'm so sorry, Bella," she said. "It was Jasper. He needed it. He isn't like Carlisle and Edward and the others – the craving was driving him mad."

"You went along with it," Bella whispered, sitting back on the bed.

Alice spread her hands apart. "I love him," she said simply. "It was what he needed." When Bella didn't respond, Alice drifted toward her and sat down on the bed, not too close. "Bella, you have to understand that the world isn't always as simple as we'd like it to be. Things aren't always just black and white sometimes."

"But that's human life we're talking about," Bella burst out. "That's _killing._ If that's not black and white, I don't know what is."

"Maybe so," said Alice softly. "But to be perfectly honest, I can't say that it wasn't a blessed relief to me too." She chuckled again, weary and humorless. "I'm a vampire. It's my nature."

Bella felt sick to her stomach. Seeing her pallor, Alice laid a gentle hand on her leg. Bella couldn't help it; she flinched. Alice drew her hand back slowly.

"It was only once," she said. "I've gone back to vegetarianism. And it was far away from here."

"It wasn't just once for Jasper, was it?" Bella asked. Alice didn't say anything. Silence between them had never been so uncomfortable. _I set him off,_ Bella thought miserably. _Not only did I drive the Cullen family apart, but I caused the deaths of actual human beings, God only knows how many. I'm as guilty as if I cut their throats myself. _

At last Bella stirred herself and asked, "Is he back too?"

"He's nearby," Alice said. "He needs a little more time to get used to being around people again. His hunger is a little less urgent, for now." She paused. "He feels horrible about what happened. He wishes more than anything that he could take that afternoon back."

Bella blinked back against the sorrow that threatened to choke her. Poor Jasper, who tried so hard, who wrestled with his hunger so valiantly. "I don't really blame him," she said at last. "Edward explained why – why my smell would have set him off that day." She looked up at Alice, knowing her eyes were filling up with tears. Modesty be damned; Alice should know the truth. "You know that Edward and I had just had sex for the first time? I had finally talked him into it – I finally convinced him that he wouldn't hurt me – but I forgot about the blood."

Alice's face crumpled as understanding dawned.

"He saw the blood and he – he – " Bella's voice broke, the tears spilling over. "He _attacked _me. He almost killed me. He stopped himself just in time, and that was when I ran to the bathroom. And then Jasper – "

She couldn't finish. "Oh, Bella, I'm so sorry," whispered Alice. "I should have known that it was something like that. But smelling you that way – it was just instinct, it just took us over. You know we would never intentionally hurt you. None of us would."

Bella, nodded, wiping at her eyes.

"Edward loves you," Alice said earnestly, leaning forward and laying her hand on Bella's leg again. This time, Bella didn't flinch. "He's not gone for good – he knows he can't make that mistake twice." She smiled wryly. "He means to come back. I can see that."

Of course. "Alice?" said Bella hesitantly, hope flaring in her. "What else have you seen?"

Alice opened her mouth to speak, then frowned, biting her lip. Bella had never seen her so unsure of herself. "I don't really know what I'm seeing," she said at last. "Nothing is decided yet. I catch flashes of the places where he plans to go, but I don't know what he's looking for, and I don't know if he's going to find it." She looked down, toying with the fringe on a throw blanket. "And he's farther away from me than he's ever been before. I don't know if I sense him right away, in real time, or if there's some kind of delay." She met Bella's eyes. "I'm sorry that I don't have better news for you."

Bella sighed, suddenly exhausted. "It's ok," she said, gesturing at the map tacked over her desk. "As long as I keep getting postcards from him. As long as I know he's still out there." She couldn't even finish her thought, and scrubbed at her eyes. Alice got up from the bed and looked at the map, tracing lines between thumbtacks. She was silent for a long moment.

"I wonder," she murmured, barely loud enough for Bella to hear.

"What?"

"I wonder if he's looking for other vampires," Alice said, not turning. "Old ones. He hasn't gone to Volterra yet, but he seems to be choosing old cities. Old seats of power tend to have covens of old vampires, the ones who are powerful enough to stay in one place instead of traveling around, fighting and hunting." She shook her head. "I hope he knows what he's doing."

Bella shivered, suddenly cold at the idea of Edward alone in dark castles, in crypts and catacombs. These old vampires certainly didn't share the Cullens' humanitarian philosophical bent – would they be friendly to one of Carlisle's strange clan? What if Edward went prying somewhere he wasn't welcome, without his family around him, somewhere she couldn't possibly find him?

"Alice?" she burst out, her voice almost a squeak. "Distract me, could you please?"

Alice climbed back onto the bed, looking concerned. "You're worried about him, aren't you?"

Bella nodded fiercely. "Tell me about – tell me about you and Jasper," she said.

Alice's eyes softened. "You remember how we met," she said. Bella nodded again, pulling a pillow into her lap and hugging it tightly. "Well, there's not much more to the story than that," she said. "I just knew who he would be, and where we would meet, and then it was just a matter of waiting for him."

"If only it were so easy," whispered Bella.

Alice smiled wistfully, looking down. "I sometimes envy people the mystery," she said. "A little uncertainty makes things pretty exciting, doesn't it?" Bella thought of the nauseating worried butterflies she'd had in her stomach for two months, and didn't say anything. "But this is how I am, and it works for me."

"You're happy together?" Bella asked softly.

Alice looked up, and her face lit slowly, as if from within. She nodded. "It's like nothing I can describe," she said. "He's…" She paused. "He's just perfect. Sometimes I think he knows my moods better than I do. He can anticipate whatever I need, to the point where I wonder if _he_ is the one who can see the future. And he's so thoughtful. And he's _funny_, Bella." Alice grinned, and it was so infectious that Bella couldn't help smiling along. "I know he's never really been able to relax around you, but when he's just around the family, he cracks everyone up on a regular basis." She was pensive for a moment. "There are times when I look at him and I wonder how it's possible that someone so beautiful can be mine."

Bella's heart twinged, because she recognized the feeling. _But of course it makes sense that Jasper is with you,_ she thought, looking at Alice in all her thoughtless fey beauty. _You're beautiful and graceful and unbreakable. You're perfect, just like he is._ She thought suddenly, unprompted, of their two bodies intertwined, the golden head bending toward the dark spiky one. How easily they would move together, without fear, without danger, with only one kind of appetite joining them.

"You seem to be perfectly matched," she murmured.

"We are," said Alice blithely. "It's funny, because we're so different in so many ways. He can be so calm and quiet and reserved, and I'm…" She smiled wryly. "Well, you know how I am. But I push him, and he grounds me, and we work. He's my opposite and equal."

"Equals," said Bella. "That's it, though. Edward and I can never be equals. He's always just a little bit beyond me. I'm sick of being clumsy Bella, slow Bella, soft fragile human Bella who needs to be protected and carried around and treated like a child." Alice opened her mouth to protest, but Bella pushed ahead; the tears were coming again, and she fought them fiercely. "We can't ever be easy around each other if he can't relax with me. And that might be very intense and romantic at first, but what kind of relationship will that be in the long term?" She wiped angrily at the tears that insisted on falling. Alice was looking at her intently, and for once Bella felt that she could read the thoughts in her friend's mind. "The only answer is for me to be changed," she said. "And that scares me. It scares me more than the knowledge that if I stay human, I'm going to die some day. I don't _want_ to thirst for blood. I don't _want _to lose my family and my future and my humanity."

She paused for a long time. Alice didn't push her, but just waited. "I love him so much," she whispered. "If it comes to it, I'll do anything for him. But I'm frightened."

"I wish I could help you," said Alice softly. "I don't remember my life before I was changed. It's true, the transition isn't easy. But in our family we have a pretty good life together, and we take care of each other, and we would help you."

_But at what cost?_ thought Bella. Instead, she asked, "Have you seen what's going to happen to me?"

Alice sighed. "It's gotten jumbled along with everything else," she said. "I used to see just two possibilities – you would either be changed, or… or…"

"Or dead," Bella supplied flatly.

"Well, yes," Alice said apologetically. "But everything is murky now. I see things sometimes but I don't understand them. I think it's tied up with Edward and whatever he's looking for." She reached across and took Bella's hand, and the coolness of her skin reminded Bella of Edward's hands, and she bit her lip, willing herself not to break down again. "This is uncharted territory for all of us," she said. "I hate to admit it, because I'm used to having the advantage, but we have to take it one day at a time. I'm here for you, and so are Carlisle and Esme and everyone else, and Edward will be here soon. We can figure things out."

Bella smiled a shaky smile, and heard from downstairs the sound of Charlie closing the front door. She and Alice went downstairs, and though Charlie gave Bella a sharp sidelong look when she announced that Alice was home from her trip with her great-uncle, he submitted easily enough to Alice's effortless charms. She agreed to stay for dinner, and expertly disguised the fact that she didn't eat a bite of her macaroni and cheese.

The girls talked for hours, Alice rearranging Bella's closet while Bella finished her homework. Just being around Alice was enough to restore something of Bella's calm and keep the butterflies at bay for a few hours. It was a relief to relax, to talk about Edward without panic gripping her by the throat. She was genuinely sad when Alice announced that she had to go.

"Jasper will be waiting for me," she explained. "We have to go home and see Carlisle."

"You haven't been home yet?" Bella asked incredulously. "And you spent the whole day with me?"

"Of course," said Alice simply. "You needed me more."

Bella hugged her, and Alice kissed her cheek.

As she was falling asleep a short time afterward, she was suddenly jolted awake by a memory of Angela, her back stiff, her cheeks flushed. _I never called her_, Bella thought guiltily. She looked at the glowing numbers on her clock, but it was far too late to call, and Angela's parents were strict with a no-texting-after-9-pm rule. She had to satisfy herself with the thought that she'd talk to Angela tomorrow at school.

_She'll understand,_ Bella thought, drifting back into sleep. _Alice is back._


	4. Chapter 4

**Hello to all my new readers! After a long hiatus I've had a very exciting few days in the world of fanfiction -- first my short story Lost was reviewed by the incredible Legna989 for The Lazy Yet Discerning Ficster, then Clear Light got a mention by stickytacky (updated 5/1: stickytacky is actually the writer quothme, whose stories I've somehow gone this long without discovering -- I've just started Awake In The Infinite Cold and it's fantastic) on the livejournal community Twilight Enablers. Wowie! I'm blown away by all the love. Thanks, guys!**

**As usual, everything you recognize belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Mllebojangles, you complete me.  
**

* * *

4

Charlie was drinking coffee at the table the next morning when Bella breezed through the kitchen, grabbing a granola bar to eat on the ride to school. She called a goodbye over her shoulder as she headed toward the door, but instead of Charlie's usual gruff parting, he called, "Hey, Bells, hang on a second, willya?"

She turned back, expecting him to tell her he'd be working a late shift or something, but instead he took a slow sip of coffee and looked up at her. "So Alice Cullen is back in town, huh?"

"Yeah," said Bella, taken aback.

"Hm," he grunted. "Her brother home too? Edward?"

Bella fidgeted uncomfortably, toying with the strap on her bookbag. "Um. No, not yet," she said. "He was going to be in South America with his uncle for a while."

Charlie was silent for a moment, and Bella was about to say that she ought to be leaving, but then he said, "Are you and Edward still an item?"

She blushed, of course, but said with as much dignity as she could muster, "Yes, Dad."

"And you're ok with him being gone so long."

He was obviously thinking about the last time Edward had left. "I'm fine," said Bella. "I get postcards from him. I know he's coming home."

"Hm." More Charlie-style inscrutable silence. Bella shifted from foot to foot. "You going to keep hanging out with the Weber girl now that the Cullens are back?"

Bella frowned. "Well, yeah – I mean, why wouldn't I?" she asked, wondering where this sudden burst of concern about her social life had come from.

Charlie shrugged. "She just seems like a nice normal girl, that's all. Seems like a good friend for you."

_Normal._ Bella bristled. "Normal as opposed to Edward and Alice? What, you don't think they're good friends for me?"

He held up his hands in a placating gesture. "You know I don't have anything against Dr. Cullen's kids," he said. "But things just seem to get very… intense… when they're around." Bella opened her mouth to protest, but he went on, speaking with uncharacteristic force. "You've made a good friend and you're doing so well in school. I'd hate to see you get dragged back into something and get all shaken up again."

Bella scowled. _So you want my life to be as boring as yours?_ "I need to get to school, Dad."

He picked up his mug again. "Yeah, yeah, go." As she strode toward the door, she heard him say, "Have a good day, sweetheart."

She slammed the door behind her and fumed as she started up the truck. Nice normal friends. Like Charlie knew who was or wasn't good for her. Should she start hanging around with Jessica and Mike and Tyler and Lauren again, normal kids without a thought in their heads beyond the next school dance or trip to Port Angeles? Normal kids who didn't know what real love felt like, or real fear? Kids for whom lust was just hormones and desire, not tied inextricably up with hunger and death; kids who didn't have to worry about blood and venom and incompatibility and self-denial and immortality and looking into their lovers' eyes and seeing only a predator there staring back at them –

She gasped, gripping the steering wheel, feeling suddenly numb. Normal. Alice and Edward weren't normal, could never be normal, and neither could she now, because of them.

Someone honked behind her, and she realized she was sitting still at a green light. She stomped down on the accelerator and the truck jolted forward through the light rain.

The school was predictably buzzing with the news that Alice Cullen was back from her mysterious trip around the world, but Edward was still gone, and once more Bella felt the curious eyes as she maneuvered through the halls. She tried to find Angela before class to apologize, but with Alice suddenly at her elbow everywhere she went, she never found the chance. She spotted Angela once between morning classes, and sent her what she hoped was an appropriately apologetic look, but Jessica had the quiet girl monopolized – probably with some convoluted soap-opera of gossip – and Bella wasn't sure Angela had seen her.

Just before lunch, Bella ducked back to her locker to grab a book she had forgotten. Digging through the drifts of papers and notebooks, she gradually tuned in to a conversation happening at the other end of the nearly-empty hall.

"Good to have Alice Cullen back," said a male voice. "She's one nice thing to look at in this town full of freaks."

"No way, man," said another deep voice. "She's freaky enough herself. Something about her just creeps me out – her and the whole bizarro family. They can stay gone, for all I care."

"Still, I bet she's a demon in the sack," said the first voice. "All little and bendy like that." Bella cringed behind her locker door, revolted.

There was snickering, and another voice said, "Do you really want to wake up to those creepy yellow eyes, though?"

"Nah, I'd send her home as soon as I was done with her, with a smack on her little round ass…" The voices drifted away as the boys turned the corner, and Bella shuddered, closing her locker. Were these the normal boys Charlie would rather see her with, all crude smug words and macho posturing? She wrapped her arms around herself, longing for Edward.

She made her way to the cafeteria, feeling nauseated, and bought a yogurt cup and some juice. When she stepped out into the dining room, she instantly felt the eyes on her again. There was Angela, sitting with Jessica and Lauren and Eric and the rest of them, watching her intently, and there was Alice, sitting at the Cullen's old empty table, alone. Her golden eyes seemed to pierce Bella's thoughts.

_I won't be normal – not for Charlie, not for anyone._ She squared her shoulders, shoved the part of herself that noticed the hurt in Angela's eyes deep down, and walked toward Alice.

* * *

The rhythm of her days changed now that Alice had returned. As often as not, Alice drove her to school, and since they had many of their classes together, they were rarely apart during the day. After school, they sometimes went to Bella's house, or sometimes drove to Port Angeles for a change of scenery. Sometimes Alice went straight home, knowing when Jasper needed her nearby. Bella resisted her entreaties to come to the Cullen house with her. The thought of five sets of superhuman eyes trained on her at the same time was too overwhelming; she didn't think she could take that kind of scrutiny. Also, though she wouldn't have admitted it, she was nervous to be around Jasper – not out of fear, but because she didn't want to confront what had happened on that awful day, not before she saw Edward again.

On those days, Bella would call Angela. She had patched things up with her friend after Alice's first day back in school, and she thought Angela had accepted her apology with good grace. "Alice doesn't really have other friends, and she's lonely without her siblings here," Bella had explained, somewhat lamely. But she thought she heard voices in the background on the phone, and Angela didn't stay on the line long; in fact, she was spending more time with Jessica than she used to. She also didn't seem to be free for afternoon homework sessions as often anymore, and when they did get together, the ease they had found together seemed to have worn a bit thin. Bella tried not to think about it, and ignored the voice saying that she herself was the one causing the distance between them.

And through all of this, the postcards kept arriving, a tenuous lifeline. Moscow, Helsinki, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris, Bern. The familiar names were comforting to her, and the spiral of thumbtacks on the map seemed to be tightening.

("He's avoiding the Middle East," she had observed to Alice.

"Too sunny," said Alice.)

The weeks passed, and the postcards were erratic: Naples, Athens, Delphi, Sofia, Istanbul. Then a longer pause then usual, then a card from Budapest, and his handwriting was sloppier than usual, as if he had written in haste. Another pause of several days, and then a card from Bucharest, and this one said nothing at all on the back. Bella's heart froze in her chest when she turned the card over, but Alice laughed delightedly when she saw it.

"What a perfectly delicious cliché," she giggled. Bella gaped at her, heart in her throat. "Oh, don't you see, Bella, he's in Transylvania." She collapsed in another fit of giggles. "Think Count Dracula and deep dark forests and bats in ruined towers. I can't even believe how perfect it is."

Bella had difficulty finding the humor in the situation, and asked, "Are there really vampires in Transylvania?"

"There must be," said Alice, mischief in her eyes. "Stories have to come from somewhere, don't they?"

Bella didn't reply, but pressed her palm against the blank white space on the card. _I love you. Come back._

_

* * *

_

The card from Bucharest was the last one Bella received. After four days of watching the mailbox, she started to feel antsy; after a week she was having trouble paying attention in class. After ten days she was positively frantic. Alice insisted that she would know if something bad were going to happen, but she herself admitted that her vision had been muddled lately where Edward was concerned, and Bella didn't feel reassured. The days ticked by, and Charlie seemed to be treading on eggshells around her, watching her out of the corners of his eyes. She felt that at any moment she might crack into a thousand pieces.

On a Friday morning, Bella's alarm woke her out of a clammy anxious nightmare of dark corridors and shadowed doorways. Edward had been somewhere nearby, but she couldn't see him; it was as if he were always one turn ahead of her, always leaving her behind. The heat of the shower did little to wash away her nerves. She skipped breakfast.

She didn't think she could stand Alice's usual good-natured morning chatter, so she sent her a brief text and drove herself to school. She felt she hardly heard what anyone said to her. _What if he's hurt? What if he got caught in the sunlight? What if he couldn't find a place to hunt?_ She chewed her lip and brooded through her classes, through lunch and well into the afternoon.

"Bella." Someone was saying something. "Earth to Bella." There were giggles, and she looked up. Mr. Jamison was waving a sheet of paper at her. "Your conference with the guidance counselor is supposed to be starting right now."

Conference with the guidance counselor? She jumped and scrambled to collect her books as the memory sank in – all the seniors were assigned to meet with Ms. Rossi that week to talk about their plans for after graduation. She had shoved the thought aside, just as she had shoved all the college brochures that had arrived in the mail into a drawer. It was with a sinking heart that she walked into Ms. Rossi's office. What could she possibly say? _I don't have any plans because I'm waiting for my vampire boyfriend to figure out whether we can possibly be together without him or his family killing me? I haven't applied to college because in a few months I'll probably be either immortal or dead?_

Ms. Rossi looked up. "Bella," she said with a smile. "Please sit."

She did, uncomfortably.

"So tell me about your plans for after graduation," Ms. Rossi said brightly. "Are you looking at any schools in particular?"

"Um, I haven't really decided yet," said Bella. Ms. Rossi looked at her over the top of her glasses, waiting for her to continue. She fidgeted. "I mean, I don't really know if I want to go to college – at least not right away –" Her words trailed away. She blushed, hating how she sounded.

"Really?" said Ms. Rossi. "That's a bit surprising, to be honest." She shuffled through the papers in an open manila file folder on her desk. "Your grades are very good, Bella, and your college board scores are excellent. Your extracurriculars aren't very strong, it's true, but even so I don't think you'd have any trouble getting into any school nearby, and you'd have a good shot at places farther afield." Bella didn't say anything. "Have you visited any schools?" Ms. Rossi said kindly. "I know the idea of college can be a bit scary if you've never lived away from home before, but I often find that once students go and visit and see what it's like, it's a lot easier for them to picture themselves there."

_She thinks I'm scared_, Bella thought. "That's not it," she said. "I did want to go to college – I mean, I do, but –" She stopped, feeling pathetic, trying not to talk herself into a corner.

"But what?" Bella bit her lip and willed her color to go down. Ms. Rossi sighed and took off her glasses. "Bella, I think I know what's going on here, and without going into details, just let me say that I've seen too many students – particularly girls – who let their romantic relationships affect their decisions about what to do after high school. It may be difficult for you to see it now, but the cold hard reality is that high school relationships don't always last, and there may come a day when you regret not following your own path."

_I know,_ thought Bella, sick of lying, miserable with self-doubt.

"You have so much potential for a bright future ahead of you," said Ms. Rossi, replacing her glasses. "I'd hate to see that go to waste, and that's all I'm going to say about that. Now, in the meantime, why don't you take some of these brochures?"

They were all duplicates of ones that Bella had at home, but she accepted them wordlessly. Ms. Rossi continued to chatter about various nearby schools, and asked Bella what her favorite subject was.

"Um, English, I guess," she said, hating herself. _Nice articulate answer, genius._

"Okay, that's great," said Ms. Rossi happily, as if Bella had taken a huge step forward. "An undergraduate English major can lead you into all sorts of careers, like journalism or communications or even law…" She went on cheerfully, while Bella thought, _But I don't want to do any of those things – I just like to read books and occasionally try to write a poem I'll never show anyone, and anyway all I want to do is be with Edward and why hasn't he written to me in almost two weeks?_

Ms. Rossi sent her on her way with the usual words of encouragement, after extracting a promise that Bella would visit the schools' websites. The bell rang while Bella made her way back toward her locker, and students poured into the hallway. _How did I get to be like this?_ Bella wondered as she walked, unseeing, down the middle of the hall. _I was never all that ambitious, but I always knew I wanted to go to college, and now I can't even imagine myself leaving here. I guess if Edward wants to go to college too… but we'd have to go somewhere with as little sunlight as there is here. And would he really want to leave his family? They're all settled here. Besides, he's already done it so many times – why should he have to go through it again just because of me? Wouldn't it be better just to stay here?_

She pulled up short, almost running into someone directly in front of her. It was Lauren.

"Hi, Bella," said Lauren. There was a strange challenging ring to her voice, which Bella barely had time to notice. Jessica was flanking Lauren, and Angela stood just behind, pulling at Jessica's elbow.

"Hi," said Bella.

"So, hey, we were wondering," said Lauren, all saccharine and flashing white teeth, "do you want to go to Port Angeles with us tonight? I have an extra seat in my car." She smiled. "_One_ extra seat."

"Um," said Bella, looking at the three faces, two hard and smiling, one ashen. What was going on? "I – I can't tonight. I have plans with Ali–"

"With Alice Cullen, right," said Lauren, nodding. "That's so strange, Bella, because Angela says you two used to go there all the time, you know, before Alice got back."

"Come on, Lauren," said Angela weakly, blanching further.

"Yeah, well, I've been pretty busy," said Bella lamely, confused.

"Right," said Jessica. "Busy with Alice. You may as well come out and say it."

Bella felt herself going pale. "Alice doesn't have other friends, with her siblings all away," she began, but Lauren cut her off.

"Alice Cullen wouldn't touch anyone in this school with a ten-foot pole, and neither would any of her precious _siblings_," she snapped. "She's a snob and a heartless bitch, and so are you." Bella recoiled as if Lauren had slapped her. People were starting to stare. "But at least they don't bother to pretend that they actually care about anyone but themselves."

Angela was crying now, and trying to hide it. Jessica put an arm around her shoulders and led her away, saying, "Come on, Ange, she isn't worth it," and staring daggers back over her shoulder at Bella.

"Unbelievable," said Lauren, folding her arms and eyeing Bella coldly. "I can't believe how blatant you are. Angela spends time with you when you're all alone, and as soon as someone better comes along, you just ditch her. Nice way to treat people, Bella. Really nice." She turned on her heel and stalked away.

Bella stood staring after her in shock, too blindsided to know whether she should run after them and explain herself, or slink away in shame. She saw Angela's face before her, as she hadn't let herself see it in the past weeks: confused and hurt, eyes tight with unshed tears. Bella closed her eyes and groaned, berating herself – she was an idiot and a terrible friend, and she didn't know how she could ever make it up to Angela.

She went to her locker, grabbed her books for the weekend, slammed the door, and whirled around straight into Alice, who was bouncing toward her.

"There you are! I've been looking for you everywhere!" Alice chirped. "You have to come with me, because I have news –"

Bella broke in, her anger and hurt erupting. "I can't really deal with it right now, Alice," she said. "I'm having the worst day, and Angela is mad at me and I don't know if she'll ever forgive me…"

"But that doesn't matter!" said Alice blithely. "Because –"

"Yes, it does matter," said Bella angrily. "You made me think she doesn't matter because she doesn't matter to you. But I hurt her feelings and that might not bother you, but I feel like shit right now, so whatever it is can wait, ok?"

Now Alice looked hurt too, which made Bella inexplicably angrier. "But…" Alice began uncertainly.

"I don't want to know," hissed Bella in an undertone. "I don't want to hear about your visions or anything else that's going to screw my life up any worse than it is right now. I just want to be normal for once, so will you just leave me alone?"

Alice's eyes had gone huge in her face, and Bella stormed away. She never cut class, never, but this was too much. She all but ran through the parking lot to her truck and left.

_Everything is horrible,_ she thought, fighting back tears. _Angela hates me and now Alice does too. I ruin everything. I push everyone away._

Charlie's cruiser wasn't in the driveway, which was a mercy. She flung her bag on the sofa and ran up to her room, and cried until she felt hollow.

She went downstairs when it got dark and made spaghetti. Charlie could reheat it when he got home; her own serving tasted like sawdust, but she ate dutifully. She checked her phone, which had no messages on it. Feeling at loose ends, she put on a movie, but the jokes fell flat and the kisses seemed fake. She wanted to talk to Alice, but couldn't. Her phone sat silent on the table, not ringing, not ringing.


	5. Chapter 5

**Many many humble thanks to all of you who are reading this! You're all wonderful beyond belief. It turns out that I'm pretty bad about answering reviews, which is particularly sad considering the meager number of reviews I have, ha ha, so if I haven't answered you it doesn't mean that I don't read and appreciate everything you say. Also, if I accidentally answer your review twice because I can't remember which ones I've answered and which I haven't, you can just chalk that up to me being an idiot. Reviews in general, of course, make me dance around the room with joy.**

**Everything recognizable belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Mllebojangles is the wind beneath my wings.**

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5

She was dreaming. She was walking in the forest in late afternoon, green light filtering down through leaves, thick moss hushing her footsteps, and someone was right behind her. At first she thought it might be her father, and then she thought it might be Jacob, but neither of those seemed right. There was a breeze on her cheek and someone whispered her name, close to her ear. An arm snaked around her waist from behind, and then they were lying on the ground without having fallen, Bella curled on her side and the other behind her, curving to fit her shape, wrapping around her. It was him. She knew it was him, though she couldn't see his face. The smell of him, the tingle down the length of her body, the sweet familiarity of his face pressed into her neck.

"Bella."

_No no no,_ she thought. _I won't wake up. I'm staying here with him._

"Bella." His voice was more insistent this time. She squeezed her eyes shut.

"Bella, I'm here." There were lips at her ear, pressing kisses against the soft skin of her neck, and she trembled, the goosebumps rising on her arms. She sighed, arching back against him, and he hummed, pleasure and relief, a low rumble in his chest.

_Stay,_ she thought. _I know you're just a dream. But stay._

She turned in his arms, limbs soft and heavy with sleep, and curled into his chest, molding herself against him. He inhaled suddenly, deeply, almost a hiss, and moaned softly, "Oh, Bella." His low voice set echoes ringing along her bones.

Hands tangled in her hair, long cool fingers drawing her face up, and lips found hers, kissing her deeply until her heart ached with the cruelty of the dreaming, for this couldn't last – she would open her eyes and be alone again –

She seized the front of his shirt in both fists, breaking away with a gasp. "Stay," she whispered. "Don't go."

The arms tightened around her, pulling her against him. "I'm not leaving you, ever again," said the voice that she loved most in the world.

She sighed, perfectly content. The forest was getting very dark, and it was slowly, slowly filtering through her consciousness that the leaves and moss below her cheek had gone smooth and soft. Like her pillow. Like the sheets tangled around her legs, and around the legs of –

She blinked in the darkness. In the dim light from her window, she saw alabaster skin, the outline of an angled jaw, the glint of a streetlight in an eye only inches from her own.

She was in her own bed, and there were arms around her. Her heart gave an almost painful leap, before she even allowed herself to think the name. She raised one hand to his face, feeling blindly the cool contours of his features. His mouth moved under her fingertips.

"Edward?" she whispered.

He caught her hand in his, and pressed his lips to the ticklish quicksilver skin of the inside of her wrist. He inhaled deeply against her skin, and his body strained against hers. "My Bella," he murmured.

The pieces were falling together in her mind like tumblers clicking into place in the workings of a lock. She struggled suddenly in his arms and sat up, reaching for her bedside lamp. When the yellow light flooded the room and she saw him lying beside her, his tousled bronze-gold head on her pillow, she thought her heart might beat its way out of her chest.

"You're back," she said stupidly.

He watched her face carefully, pushing himself up onto his elbow. "Your heart is racing like I've never heard it before," he whispered, laying a hand softly in the hollow between her breasts. She drew a shuddering breath. His eyes were black as her empty windows.

"If I keel over right this minute from cardiac arrest, it will be your fault," she found herself saying conversationally. "You can't just drop in on me like this, and in fact I have half a mind to call Charlie in here and have him arrest you for disturbing the peace. He won't like that, you know. Not an ideal trait for his only daughter's boyfriend." She realized belatedly that she was babbling, and he was smiling, and it was like the sunrise after an eternity of night. "You're back," she said again.

"I'm back," he said. She had no words left; she just stared at his mouth, his eyes, his beautiful pianist's hands. The reality of him overwhelmed her. She hadn't been able to hold him in her mind, and the vision before her eyes clashed against the pale imitation that she had cherished for all those months. She was giddy, and confused, and shy.

His smile faded as she stared at him, his brows drawing together in pain. "I'm so sorry, Bella," he said softly. "I'm so sorry that I left when I promised you I wouldn't. I'm so sorry I couldn't tell you what I was doing. I know you must be angry with me – you probably don't want to see me at all, particularly in the middle of the night –"

He stopped, for her fingers were against his lips. There were a hundred things she wanted to say to him, but she looked at the hope and uncertainty in his eyes, and said only, "It's really you."

He nodded slowly.

"You're not a dream."

He shook his head, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Then she smiled in earnest, and so did he, his lips curving against her fingers. "I knew you would come back to me," she said, and he whispered, "Oh, Bella," and pulled her down to him.

She thought she might die from the joy flooding through her veins like liquid fire, from the ineffable sweetness of his mouth on hers. It was Edward, her own Edward, and not the brooding boy who was afraid to touch her the way she wanted to be touched. It was as if a switched had been flipped inside him – the melancholy was gone, and his hands were confident and sure and spoke desire with every touch. He half-rolled, half-lifted her in the narrow bed until she was beneath him, her legs snaking up around his hips in a way that he would never have allowed before. He was all hard planes and smooth muscles, and she felt small and soft pressed against him. The friction of him above her, trapping her, was driving her wild, until she felt her body might sing like the string of a violin.

Edward pulled back from her mouth, and she whimpered with disappointment. He chuckled softly, a low sound that rumbled through his chest into hers. He brought one large hand up and cupped the side of her face, his fingers sweeping into her hair. She leaned her cheek into his palm. With his thumb he stroked her cheekbone, the ridge of her eyebrow, the soft pout of her lips, even, with exquisite gentleness, the delicate skin of her closed eyelid.

"My beautiful girl," he whispered, wonder in his voice. "I had an image of your face in front of me every moment of every day, and it was nowhere near as lovely as the original, because it didn't have life and breath and warmth. I dreamed about the smell of your blood rushing in your veins, and it nearly drove me insane with the desire to come back to you."

She searched his eyes – black as moonless midnight – and remembered the bitter words he had said to her the day he left. "It's not torture to you anymore?"

His lips softened, and he drew his own shuddering breath of want. "It's the sweetest torture in the world," he whispered, bending toward her mouth, "and I can't live without it."

He kissed her again, and she abandoned herself to him, until a thought occurred to her. She pulled away. "Edward," she asked, loving the feel of the name on her lips, "Did you find what you were looking for?"

He pulled back, looking into her eyes, and smiled again, a hard-edged flinty smile. His body was instantly tense, a live wire. "Come on," he whispered, lifting himself off her, so that she felt suddenly unmoored and a little bereft. "We have to go talk to Carlisle."

She sat up. He was already out of the bed, moving too fast for her sleep-bleared eyes to follow, tossing her a pair of jeans, grabbing her shoes from beside the door, stroking her tangled hair back from her face. "Wait," she said, confused. "In the middle of the night? Can't it wait until morning?"

"It can't wait a single moment," he said, handing her a sweater. He barely waited long enough for her to pull it on, then switched off her bedside light. "Bella, I found it," he said, taking her hand and drawing her toward the window.

"Found what?" she asked.

He grinned his crooked smile in the faint light, and wrapped an arm around her waist. "Hold on," he whispered in her ear. She clasped her arms around his neck. With his free hand he slid the window open, smooth as silk, and then they were out the window; a spring from the windowsill to the closest branch, a dizzying swoop as he swung one-armed toward the ground. Bella was unsure which way was up when he set her feet on the ground, and she steadied herself with a hand on his chest. He bent his face to her hair, and she felt him inhale.

In the rustling darkness under the tree, Edward suddenly lifted her off her feet again and crushed her against him, his mouth descending on hers. She gasped against his lips at his effortless strength, his obvious hunger. The heat pooled low in her belly and her fingers twisted into his hair.

He buried his face in her neck, pressing a hungry open-mouthed kiss where the pulse fluttered at the base of her throat. "I missed you so much," he murmured.

And then he set her on her feet and was towing her toward her truck by one hand. She was disoriented by the speed of it all. "Wait," she said as loudly as she dared, digging in her feet. He stopped and looked back at her, surprised. "What were you looking for? What did you find?"

He took both her hands, gently this time. "I found the answer for us," he said. "But we have to talk to Carlisle about it. Please trust me, Bella – I'm going to explain it all when we get there."

"Have you hunted recently?" she asked, stroking the coppery hair away from his forehead, looking into his black eyes. "You look like you're starving. Carlisle won't mind if you take a little time to eat."

His smile was strange. "No, I haven't, and no, I think we should go talk first," he said. "Come on."

She had never seen him like this – he was quivering with barely-suppressed excitement. Whatever it was that he had found, something had changed; the waiting was over.

He drove, first easing Bella's truck into neutral and moving it down the street before cranking the engine to life, so as not to wake Charlie. Bella couldn't keep her eyes off him once they were in the cab of the truck, her fingers slipping into his hair, her hands straying down his arm or over his knee as he coaxed the ancient truck up to its maximum speed. He laughed at her, and his excitement was infectious, and the emptiness of the roads and the midnight escapade made her feel a little wild.

"You should put your seatbelt on," he said, and the heat in his eyes made her shiver, remembering how different it had been – how different he had been – the first time he had told her that.

She slipped under his arm and nuzzled into his chest. "No," she said.

He dropped his arm around her shoulders. The shift and play of his muscles under his thin shirt made her head spin. She squirmed against his side.

He laughed, a little helplessly. "Stop that," he said. "You're going to make me crash the truck."

"With your crazy vampire reflexes?" she said, letting her fingers dance down his chest. "I'm not worried."

"Mmm," he hummed. "You should be." The danger and promise in his low words made her ache.

The truck slowed and he cut the engine. Bella looked up in surprise at the wood and glass of the Cullens' house. The windows were bright against the dark forest backdrop. "We're here already?"

"Time flies," he murmured. He was out his door and opening hers in a flash. "Just to warn you," he said as he pulled her toward the door, "it's possible that my brothers are going to kill me when they see me."

She barely had time to register this before he was opening the front door, calling, "Carlisle!" He towed her down the hall into the living room where Jasper, Emmett, and Rosalie were playing a noisy video game on the huge flatscreen. Esme was sitting at a table with a sketchpad. Their four heads whipped around when Edward and Bella came in.

For an instant there was only shock on their faces, and then there was a great pale blur and Edward's hand was torn from Bella's grasp. Edward smashed like a train wreck into the wall by the door, pinned there by Emmett with a crash that shook the house to its foundation. Emmett roared in a voice like thunder, inches from Edward's face, "Where the_ fuck _have you been?"

"Language, please, Emmett," murmured Esme, who had risen from her seat. Her eyes were shining like two stars. Carlisle was standing on the stairway, smiling.

Despite Emmett's hand on his throat, Edward began to laugh, soft helpless laughter that continued while Emmett wrestled him into a headlock. There was a flurry of movement too fast for Bella to follow while Edward tried to fight back, and then Emmett was kneeling on Edward's chest, pinning him immobile on the floor.

There was a burst of trumpet fanfare from the television. "I win," said Rosalie. She was the only one still holding her controller; Jasper stood at the far end of the couch, still as a statue.

"That's not fair," Jasper said, but his eyes were on Bella, uncertain. She felt shy.

Carlisle and Esme were standing together now, holding hands, and they only had eyes for Edward. Rosalie stood and walked to Emmett's side, then crouched down to look into Edward's face where he lay, still chuckling. She patted the side of his face. "It's good to see you again, you insufferable asshole," she said.

"Rosalie!" said Esme and Carlisle together.

"Can I get up now?" Edward asked weakly.

"No," said Emmett.

Bella felt awkward, standing alone, but then Rosalie was unexpectedly by her side. The tall girl's arms went around her shoulders, and Bella found herself being hugged.

"I'm glad you're together again," Rosalie said softly after a moment, pulling back. "And I'm sorry you didn't come see us while Edward was away. You must have been lonely."

"I'm sorry too," said Bella truthfully. "Perhaps I should have."

Rosalie moved away briskly, as if brushing away any trace of her moment of kindness. "Maybe now things will finally be back to normal around here."

"Now can I get up?" said Edward from the floor.

"No," said Emmett.

"Boys," said Esme mildly.

"Fine," said Emmett, moving off and yanking Edward to his feet and immediately crushing him in a hug. "Don't ever do that again," he said.

"I missed you too," said Edward, looking rumpled.

Emmett came to Bella and lifted her off her feet with a hug around her middle, markedly gentler than his manhandling of Edward. "Nice to see you again, little human," he said with a grin. "We missed you."

Edward was in Esme's arms. "Hi, Mom," he said gently. Her radiant face grew somehow even brighter.

"All my boys are home," she said. She held out a hand to Bella, who went gratefully into her embrace. "And you, my dear, dear Bella."

Edward nodded to Carlisle over Esme's head, and from their shared look and Edward's almost-imperceptible nod of the head, Bella imagined a silent conversation between them. Then Edward turned.

"Jasper," he said.

Jasper walked uncertainly toward him, a crease between his brows. Edward took a step forward and they stood looking into each others' eyes – they were the same height, the golden and the bronze. Bella bit her lip.

Then Edward said, "I know," and "You're my brother," and he took the last step forward and they hugged each other, and the tension in the room dissipated. Bella realized that she had been holding her breath, and she let it out. Jasper turned to her, not too close. Edward's hand was steady on the small of her back.

"Bella, I'm so sorry," Jasper said, and there was sorrow and sweetness in the long soft vowels of his vestigial drawl. "If I could take that day back, I would. Please believe me – I'll do anything to make amends to you."

Bella didn't trust her voice, so she just nodded, and he put out his hand to her, and she gave him hers. He smiled gratefully, and bent over her hand with a gentlemanly kiss. But he dropped her hand at precisely the moment that he could do so and still be polite, and she avoided looking too closely at his eyes. If there was still red there, she didn't want to see it.

Edward was looking at someone on the stairs, and Bella turned to see where a familiar slim figure stood at the top of the stairs.

"Edward," said Alice softly. "Bella."

She came down the stairs, and Edward went to meet her, hugging her silently. When he pulled back, Bella stepped forward. "Alice, I'm –" she began.

"No, I'm sorry," said Alice hurriedly. "You were exactly right, about everything. I've treated your friends like they didn't matter and I made you hurt them because I'm not used to humans – apart from you, of course – and I'll do better from now on, and we can sit with them at lunch if you like, and please say you forgive me because I don't know what I'd do if you were mad at me."

Bella was laughing by the end of Alice's speech, and Alice stepped down the last step and gave Bella a hug. Bella realized something and pulled back. "You knew Edward was coming home," she said. "That was your news."

Alice nodded. "I'm sorry," she said again. "I wish I had timed it better when I tried to tell you, but I wasn't paying attention to anything else." She cocked her head and smiled slyly. "But I also knew it would be pretty nice to be woken up in the middle of the night."

Bella blushed and stepped back, stumbling against Edward. He steadied her with an arm around her waist and bent his head to kiss the top of hers.

"You knew he was coming home and didn't tell us?" chided Esme.

"I thought it was his business to make his entrance the way he wanted," said Alice with a sidelong look at Edward.

"Good thing, too, because if I'd known he was coming back tonight I'd've had the bonfire ready," rumbled Emmett. Rosalie snorted.

Edward's arm was still around Bella, and she could feel the tension in his frame. "Ok, everyone," he said suddenly, "I want time to catch up with all of you, but right now I need to speak to Carlisle."

Bella was looking at Alice, and saw it happen. The amber eyes glazed over, as if her gaze turned inward, and she gasped, reaching blindly for the banister. She cried out, "Oh, Edward, no!"

Edward merely turned to where Carlisle stood beside Esme. "Alone, please, Carlisle?"

"Of course," said Carlisle, frowning, and he moved toward the hall, gesturing for Edward to go with him. Edward kept his hand at the small of Bella's back and propelled her along.

"I couldn't see before!" cried Alice, springing forward to pull at Edward's sleeve. "I didn't understand what you were going to do!"

Edward didn't stop. "It's going to work, Alice," he said grimly, striding into the hallway. Bella looked back over her shoulder to see Alice alone in the doorway, and the fear on her face made Bella cold.

They entered Carlisle's office, and Carlisle went around to his desk chair and sat. Bella sat hesitantly in one of the chairs facing the desk, but Edward stayed on his feet, his jittery excitement coursing through him until Bella almost expected to see sparks shooting out of his fingers.

"Now," said Carlisle, his voice professionally calm, "will you tell me what this is all about?"

Edward leaned forward, hands flat on the top of the desk. "I've found it," he said softly, his eyes blazing. "I've found the answer. Carlisle, I've found the way to turn vampires back into humans."


	6. Chapter 6

**Thank you thank you thank you to all of you who are taking time to read this nonsense. Every time I get a story alert or a favorite story notice or a review it makes my day.**

**And take special note here: I'm not a doctor. The closest I will ever come to being a doctor is by watching too much ER and House on tv. The things I write may be farfetched or improbable or just plain wrong -- but hey, it's a story about vampires to start with, so I guess there's already some suspension of disbelief going on, eh? In any case, forgive my wild inaccuracies.**

**Everything belongs to Stephenie Meyer. All the other girls here are stars; Mllebojangles is the northern lights.  
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6

There was a stunned silence. Bella thought her heart might have stopped. Then Carlisle said, "Edward, that's not possible."

"It _is_ possible," said Edward with the same tightly-controlled intensity. "It's dangerous, but it's possible, and I can do it, Carlisle, but not without your help."

He paused, but Carlisle was silent, regarding him with his level gaze. "I went everywhere. I tracked down every coven of vampires I'd ever heard of and found plenty that none of us knew existed. At first I didn't even know what I was looking for, but I asked everywhere about vampires who had managed relationships with humans."

"I can't imagine that you found very many," said Carlisle with a frown.

"Not many, no," Edward said. "But sometimes, here and there, a thought or a mention of someone who had tried it. Usually they ended by changing the human, of course. But there was a strange undercurrent to their thoughts that I found again and again. Somewhere a rumor had started – or not even enough to call a rumor, even – more like a shadowy collective memory, or the memory of a dream – of ancient secrets of the link between humankind and our kind, secrets that show that the ties between us are more fluid than anyone could imagine. No one seemed to know where the stories came from, and no one wanted to talk about it. Among the oldest vampires I found, over and over again, a fear of some kind of retribution if they gave me too much information."

Bella caught her breath at the thought. Her heart accelerated, and Edward and Carlisle both glanced at her, scenting the change in her. Sensing her unease, Edward took her hand, his thumb stroking over her knuckles.

"How did you gain entrance with these vampires you didn't know?" he asked, drawing Edward back to his story.

Edward stayed where he was next to Bella. "Sometimes it was just luck, and sometimes it took every ounce of my wits," he answered. "But in truth, I often used your name. It carries quite a bit of weight, being able to say I'm the son of Carlisle Cullen. There are more of us out there who are interested in our way of life than you might have thought – though of course they are always wary of the Volturi."

"Yes, I can understand that," said Carlisle. "We're something of a threat to their authority by our very existence. They don't mind us as long as we don't make trouble, but they wouldn't want our lifestyle to spread. I've known this for a long time."

"Exactly," said Edward. "But the vampires I met were curious about my eyes, and they were always willing to listen, and meanwhile I followed the rumors. I went from one coven of old vampires to the next, always looking for the memory, asking questions that would lead them to remember more details. They never wanted to talk about it, but they didn't have to – if I could get them to think about it, I could see it." He grinned fiercely. "That's how I could do it! That's how I followed the trail that no one else could see. I read their thoughts."

"Of course," murmured Carlisle.

"It was hard to learn where the memories came from," Edward said. "I couldn't ask them to elaborate. But I finally got some real answers when I was in Norway. I had found a coven that lives there in an abandoned fortress from World War II, part of the coastal fortification the Nazis built during the occupation. In winter there the days are only a few hours long – and in many ways it's a paradise for the more reclusive of our kind there, since not many humans want to brave the cold and the dark. They welcomed me readily enough, but I got the sense that they were hiding something. One night they were out hunting – I didn't join them, of course, considering their prey – but they trusted me enough by this point to leave me alone. And though I thought I was alone, I heard someone's thoughts nearby."

Bella shivered, and Edward's hand tightened infinitesimally on hers.

"I followed the thoughts to a part of the fortress where I'd never been allowed, and there in a half-rusted and ruined watchtower was the oldest vampire I'd ever met."

Bella couldn't shake the cold in her bones, as if she were the one in the icy fortress, but Edward's eyes were shining.

"His mind was like nothing I've ever heard, Carlisle," he breathed. "He was almost five thousand years old. Can you even imagine? Older than the Romans and the Greeks – old as recorded history. He saw the last of the matriarchal societies of Old Europe, when humans painted animals on the walls of caves. His mind was full of deep forests and the blackest nights you've ever seen. His thoughts were the most direct, the least duplicitous, I've ever heard, yet there was immense power in him, held in check. I felt that he could bring down the mountains or fly as far as the stars without moving a muscle.

"He never spoke aloud – he sensed my gift, somehow, and we spoke mind-to-mind, but without words. He told me of the ancient line of the vampire kings who ruled the night long before humans ruled the day. They were nothing like the Volturi in their fine palaces, who cover over their cruelty with elegance and courtliness. They were brutal and ruthless and followed no law but their own, which was almost no law at all. They terrorized the human societies that had barely begun to scratch out an existence. It's no wonder humans have a primeval fear of the dark, even long after they have forgotten the horrifying menace used to hunt them in their ancient past.

"He wouldn't tell me where the ancient ones were – just that he was one of the last of them, and that he had fled an ancient feud and had lived there on the ice for many hundreds of years. But he couldn't hide everything from me. It was like I was chasing him – he was closing doors in his mind as fast as I could open them, but I caught glimpses of the secrets he tried to conceal. He knew things we've never dreamed of, Carlisle. I think he might have known about the origins of our kind."

Carlisle was speechless, entranced. Edward continued. "I saw the mountains and the dark virgin forests in his mind, so I knew I was looking for that kind of landscape. When I left Scandinavia I started searching the places he might have come from – the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Caucuses and the Aral mountains. At last I found myself in Hungary and Romania, in the Carpathian mountains near Transylvania. I honestly don't know why I didn't think of it sooner. Maybe I was subconsciously avoiding it because I didn't think the stories could possibly be true. But there's a reason that that's where the human myths of the vampires began. It's like a different world, beautiful and heartless and older than time itself. I could feel in my bones that I was in the right place. In a strange, frightening way, I think my very life-force – the venom that courses through me – knew that I was coming home."

Carlisle sat back heavily in his chair. "Incredible," he said. "I knew that the Volturi weren't always the rulers of our kind, but I never imagined that the old Dracula stories could possibly come from truth."

"They do," said Edward. "Once I found the right place, it was easier than I could possibly have expected to find them. I believe that they were calling me.

"There in the mountains are the deepest forests I've ever seen – there are trees as big around as houses, and when they die there's nowhere for them to fall and they rot standing up. There's no way to get in except by walking – and climbing – I don't think you could even land a helicopter anywhere within miles. They live in a crumbling castle in a narrow valley surrounded by mountains. It's utterly isolated. I could have searched those mountains for years and never found the way, had they not been pulling me in."

The silence between his words was complete, wrapping the three of them like cotton wool.

"There are four of them left, two men and two women, even older than the one I met in the fortress on the ice. They sit in four chairs in a ruined hall that is open to the sun and moon – the ceiling must have fallen in centuries ago, and even the rubble is crumbling to dust. They are very beautiful, but it's almost impossible to believe that they were once human. I can't even describe their eyes – there's no word for the blackness. They barely move, just sometimes turn their heads toward each other. They all speak with their minds – I don't know if that was something that once all of our kind could do, or if it's a power they gained because of their age. There were a few younger vampires, still many hundreds of years old, who are servants of a sort, and do the hunting for the old ones, but apparently they require very little blood to survive.

"They knew immediately what I was looking for. I was completely helpless before them – they could have taken apart my mind one shred at a time if they had wanted to. Instead, they gave me the answers I was seeking."

Carlisle leaned forward, and Bella's heart accelerated again.

"Vampires can be starved to death," said Edward, his eyes shining. "If we are starved of blood for long enough, the venom weakens and weakens in us, until at the very end we are human again, and die."

It was as if the world had contracted down to the size of the room. Bella found herself struggling to work out the meaning of his words, as if he were speaking a language she only half-remembered.

Carlisle was shaking his head slowly. "But that's impossible," he said. "Vampires can't starve to death."

"They can," insisted Edward. "Have you tried it?"

"Yes," said Carlisle decisively. "When I was first turned, remember? I hid myself away in a cave until –"

"Until you smelled the herd of deer nearby and realized that you could live on animals' blood – yes, I remember," broke in Edward. "But how long did you last?"

Carlisle frowned. "Three months, maybe a week less."

"And what did it do to you?"

"It almost cost me my sanity," said Carlisle, grimacing. "I grew weak and dizzy and nearly mad with thirst."

"Exactly," said Edward. "Now, can you imagine what would have happened if you hadn't been able to hunt those deer? If you had been somehow prevented from finding a way to feed?"

Carlisle paused. "I… I don't know."

"No vampire could do it to himself or herself," said Edward. "Our instinct for self-preservation kicks in and we eventually break down and hunt, just as you did. But the Carpathians knew how to do it. When they were in power all those hundreds and thousands of years ago, they used it as a punishment, the very cruelest form of execution reserved for their worst enemies. The ones condemned to die were restrained and guarded night and day by stronger vampires, prevented from hunting until they were too weak to move."

The horror was written plainly on Carlisle's face. "What incredible torture," he murmured.

Edward nodded. "When the prisoners were weak enough that they no longer needed to be held by other vampires, they were chained to a great rock in the throne hall. I could see it in the ancients' minds, Carlisle. They watched it happen – they took wagers on how long it would last. Without blood to feed it, the venom in the starving one got weaker and weaker, devouring itself over the course of weeks and months, gradually withdrawing from the limbs and the organs. And at the very last, the venom vanished completely, and the human processes that had been suspended since the instant of the vampire's creation tried to restart themselves. The brain awoke, the lungs pulled in air, and the heart tried to beat."

"But there was no blood," breathed Carlisle.

"No blood," said Edward, nodding.

Bella blanched.

"The heart gave one strangled beat, maybe two," said Edward. "I saw it in their memories, as plain as day. The veins were empty and the vampire, now human, died instantly. I saw the rock and the chains at the center of their ruined hall. I saw the human bones littered around it."

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Edward and Carlisle stared at each other, gold eyes locked with black, a closed circuit with Bella on the outside. With the dark windows and the quiet of the rest of the house, she felt that time might have stopped completely. She blinked hard against the bleariness of interrupted sleep, and her eyes felt too big for their sockets. A voice was setting up a quiet chant somewhere inside her: _No, no, no, no, no._

Carlisle sat back suddenly with a loud exhalation. "You want to do this."

"Yes," said Edward.

"And you want me to help you."

"Yes," said Edward. He leaned forward. "You're the only one who can. You're the only vampire I know of with the medical knowledge and the tolerance for blood – because there will have to be quite a lot of blood."

_No, no, no,_ said the voice in Bella.

Carlisle rubbed his fingers over his mouth pensively, eyes trained on the desk before him. "Yes," said Edward urgently, in response to something in Carlisle's thoughts, and Carlisle looked up at him. "We could do it," said Edward. "The timing would have to be perfect, but we could do it. The venom preserves our bodies in perfect condition. At the instant the venom disappears, we flood my veins with transfused blood. We'd just have to keep my heart beating long enough to start circulation."

_This is absurd, _thought Bella. _He can't be serious._ Her tongue seemed to be glued in place.

"We would need to put you on a ventilator to keep your lungs functioning until they worked on their own," said Carlisle slowly, his mind obviously racing through implications. "And you would need near-constant CPR to keep your heart beating." "Yes," said Edward, his eyes beginning to glow.

"Your body temperature would be far too low," said Carlisle, sitting forward now, beginning to drum his fingers on the desk. "But we could use that to our advantage, and induce a coma to mitigate the oxygen deprivation in your brain. The transfusion would be the hardest part, though. We would have to be sure not to begin to give you blood until the venom was gone, or else we would just bring it back to life. I wonder if our vampire flesh loses its stiffness as the venom weakens, or if it happens all at once when the venom disappears. If it happens gradually, we could possibly open your veins with a saline solution, to prepare them for the blood…"

"Yes," said Edward.

Bella nearly choked on her disbelief.

Carlisle stood and began to pace before the windows. "The more points of transfusion, the better," he murmured, more to himself than to Edward. "We could put central venous catheters into your subclavial and jugular veins, and use the femoral and branchial veins as well… That would mean at least six catheters, and I've never heard of so many being used at once, but I've also never heard of a complete-volume blood transplant into a body without any blood at all, so perhaps there is a first time for everything." He turned back to Edward. "There is always the danger of a transfusion rejection. We have no way of knowing what your blood type was when you were human, because the study of blood typing was in its earliest stages during your lifetime."

"That's true," said Edward. "But I thought you might be able to remember. You were the one who tasted my blood, and if you remember it as well as I remember all the human blood I've ever tasted, you might be able to figure out what type I was."

"Of course," said Carlisle. "Different types must have subtle differences in taste. I never considered that. And we could use O-negative as well." He frowned. "We would have to do it here and not at the hospital, naturally, and I will need to begin stocking up on blood soon – contrary to what you might think, ordinary doctors don't have unlimited access to vast amounts of blood and whatever supplies they might need. We'll have to buy the monitors and the ventilator and transfusers." He glanced shrewdly at Edward. "This would be a very great risk, son. I couldn't guarantee the success of it."

"But it might work," said Edward with a brilliant smile.

"Yes," said Carlisle.

"No!" cried Bella, almost strangling on the word.

The golden eyes and the black ones snapped to her, as if they only now remembered that she was in the room.

"No, Edward, you can't, you just can't," she babbled, panic sending her voice high and uncertain. "You can't try this. I'd rather you turned me. I'll drink blood, I'll give up everything. Just please say you won't do this."

She was standing although she didn't remember getting to her feet, and Edward was trying to catch her fluttering hands and saying, "Bella, Bella, wait –"

"No," she cried again. "I won't let you do this. Do you know how many things might go wrong? How do you even know the vampires were telling you the truth? How do you know your body will still work the way it's supposed to? What if your heart never starts? What if your brain never wakes up and you're a vegetable forever?" Her voice was rising uncontrollably. "Carlisle even said he's never heard of this being done! This is madness!"

"Bella, please listen –" He had her by the arms and was trying to draw her in toward his chest, but she fought him.

"No, you listen," she shouted. "You don't get to make unilateral decisions for us anymore. I'm not going to stand by and let you kill yourself out of some sort of delusional heroism – I won't let you, Edward, I won't!" She rounded on Carlisle. "Tell him that this is pure insanity!"

Carlisle held up his hands in a gentling gesture. "Now, Bella, no one is doing anything yet."

"But he will!" she shouted. "He's already starving himself! Have you seen his eyes? How long has it been since you've eaten anything, Edward?"

He looked at her steadily. "Almost a month," he said.

Carlisle's eyebrows shot up, but he didn't say anything.

"Did you hear that?" Bella cried. "He's going to kill himself and you're not going to do anything to stop him?"

"I think I can be trusted to consider my son's safety, Bella," Carlisle said softly. She flushed, chastened. He turned to Edward. "You truly haven't hunted in a month?"

Edward nodded. "I was planning to hunt after Romania, but then I heard what the Carpathians had to say, and I figured I had a head start. I haven't even wanted to since then."

Carlisle crossed to him, his face serious. He took Edward's wrist in his hand, weighing it as if he were taking his pulse, then took a pen-sized flashlight off his desk and examined his son's midnight-black eyes. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

"A little strange," Edward admitted, blinking at the light. "But still perfectly functional. I've had a sort of wild energy, but perhaps that was just my excitement to get home."

"Something like an adrenaline rush," Carlisle murmured. "The venom is pushing you." He sighed, switching off his light. Bella gnawed on her lip, and Carlisle glanced at her warily. "I'm not going to lie to you, Edward," he said. "If you follow through with this, even if we are successful, you have some very difficult time ahead of you. I remember what it was almost to starve. You may feel unaffected now, but that will change. The hunger and the compulsion to feed are overpowering. I made it three months, and that was with my newborn strength of my human blood still in me. You have been taking only animals' blood, which has never nourished us as well as human blood does."

"I'm strong," said Edward.

"For now," said Carlisle.

A sound escaped Bella, something between a sob and a groan. Edward's arms went around her. "I can't believe you're going to try this," she whispered against his chest. "I just got you back. If I lost you, Edward…" She looked up into his eyes. "I don't know what I would do."

"You're not going to lose me," he said, and there was more hope in his voice than she had ever heard from him. "Just think how it will be when we're both human. We can have a real life together, Bella! We can do everything together. Everything."

Bella looked over at Carlisle, who was watching them critically. "It just seems that there's so much we don't know."

"That's true," said Carlisle. "But we have time. Nothing needs to be decided tonight. If things begin to go wrong, Edward, you can feed again at any time and the venom will heal you."

Edward's arms tightened around Bella, and he didn't say anything. Bella pounced on Carlisle's words. "Yes," she said. "It's a compromise, Edward. We try to figure out if this can work, and in return you promise that you'll stop if things don't go well."

He looked down at her, a crease between his brows. Her mind was a tumult. _I'm terrified,_ she thought. _You think I don't have faith in you, but I do – I know that if you set your mind to it you'll go through with this. I wish beyond wishing that this could truly work – I've never even let myself imagine that you could be human, not really – but I can't let you take this step without me and I'm afraid._ For once, she wished that he could hear her thoughts – perhaps he could make more sense of them than she could.

Slowly he nodded. "A compromise, then," he said. Bella breathed out.

A bird began to sing just outside Carlisle's window, and together they looked out at the darkness, which was much less black than it had been. "I should be at home before my father wakes up," Bella said.

"Take her home, Edward," said Carlisle, scrubbing his hand through his hair in a sudden gesture that was very reminiscent of his son. "And after all, what were you thinking, dragging her out of bed in the middle of the night? I hope I haven't taught you such inconsideration." Edward grinned, unrepentant, but let go of her. She wished she could feel some of his lightness, some of the fiery hope that seemed to have taken him over.

Carlisle put an arm around each of their shoulders as they walked to the door of his office. He gave Bella a squeeze and kissed the top of her head. "We will figure this out, Bella," he said soothingly. "We have time."

The rest of the family was in the living room. Alice sprang up when they appeared in the doorway. "Edward –" she began.

"We will discuss this later, Alice," Carlisle said firmly. "Bella has to go home now. There will be time for talk later."

Edward took her hand. As they walked to the door, she felt six pairs of eyes on her back, and shivered.

The ride home was silent in the blue pre-dawn light. She clung to him while he easily scrambled up the tree outside her window, and deposited her inside. He made to turn to go, but she clutched the front of his shirt. "Stay with me for a few hours?" she whispered.

His face slid into a relieved smile. "Of course," he murmured. She shed her sweater and jeans, too exhausted to feel self-conscious, and he followed her as she crawled under the covers. She curled into his chest, eyes already closing. He rubbed circles between her shoulderblades. "It's going to work," he whispered into her hair.

_How do you know?_ she wanted to ask, but she was too far gone to speak.


	7. Chapter 7

**Hello hello, all you wonderful people! Thank you for sticking with me, despite my dreadful slowness. A few short-ish chapters coming up... but hey, that means slightly more frequent updates, right? My readers are the best, but reviewers are the ultra-super-über-best.  
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**Everything belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Mllebojangles, ma belle, sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble.  
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7

Bella was swimming upward from a very long way down. There was something important she had to remember – two important somethings, in fact – but she couldn't quite reach them. She struggled toward them, toward the light dawning outside her closed eyes.

There were arms around her.

Her eyes snapped open, and there was Edward, his face just inches from her own, looking at her with a smile more beautiful than sunlight. Her heart blossomed open in that moment.

"Hi," he whispered, and leaned forward to kiss her. At the touch of his lips, the shadows of sleep fled, and light poured through her, down to her fingertips, her toes.

She opened her eyes when he pulled away. "Hi," she whispered back, unable to control her smile.

"I love watching you wake up," he said softly, stroking the hair away from her face. "You didn't move at all for almost five hours while you slept, then you came up from out of nowhere. You're like a mermaid surfacing from the deep."

"That's how it felt for me too," Bella whispered, "though perhaps less like a mermaid and more like the great slime monster of the ooze." He laughed softly, and she stretched in the circle of his arms, feeling lazy and languid as she pressed cat-like against him. His hand traced down the long sinuous curve of her spine.

"Nonsense," he murmured in her ear, and she shivered. "Mermaid, siren, undine –" he nuzzled her neck with each word, until she was giggling helplessly – "incubus, enchantress… There's no label that doesn't fit you."

"Now you're just being ridiculous," she managed, laughing, as his hands went from caressing to tickling, darting to her ribs, her neck, the soft places on the insides of her arms. She squirmed and rolled away from him, but he caught her and trapped her against him, her back pressed into his chest. He relented only when she yelped, wriggling.

"Easy – Charlie's downstairs," he murmured into her hair.

She stilled, but her heart was pounding, and his fingers were still moving softly against her skin. One hand slipped under the hem of her shirt, moving stealthily upward, and suddenly all her attention was trained on that short stretch of skin between navel and breast, willing his fingers higher.

His fingertips brushed the soft underside of her breast, and his other hand started to edge underneath the elastic at the waist of her underwear. She froze.

"What are you doing?" she whispered.

"Something I should have done that afternoon," he whispered. One hand crept higher, the other lower, until his fingers stroked through the soft curls there. She whimpered.

"Can you be very quiet?" he breathed in her ear. Warmth flooded through her at his low words, and she nodded, not trusting her voice. He shifted backward so that she was lying against him, and deftly maneuvered his knee under hers until her leg was draped over his. She felt spread-eagled and exposed, and the thought of how she must look lying open under his hands made her throb with want.

She felt him slip lower, fingers warming to her flesh, maneuvering through the delicate folds until his cool fingertips dipped inside her, finding the center of her warmth and wetness. She bit back a moan.

"Oh, wow," Edward whispered, his voice gone soft with wonder. His hand flexed on her breast, thumb circling the tight peak, while the fingers of his other hand slid through the slickness at her center. She arched against him, hips curling instinctively up as his fingers began a dizzying pattern, stroking up where she was most sensitive then back down into the wetness. She could feel the ramrod-stiff evidence of his arousal where his body cradled her hips from behind, and he shifted, pressing himself into her more fully, his leg hooking hers and pulling her even farther open. She moaned softly. He chuckled, a low dark sound, and his hand disappeared from her breast, making her whimper with disappointment. He worked his arm up until it was behind her neck.

"Hush," he whispered, tracing over her lips, and she sucked his finger into her mouth, making him growl with pleasure. "God, Bella," he murmured. "You're so warm –" he kissed her ear – "and soft –" dipping his tongue into the delicate whorls – "and sweet – and wet –" and here he slid one cool finger deep inside her, his thumb working high, circling her where she ached and yearned for his touch. His hand dove back into her shirt, cupping her, teasing the tight bud of her nipple, and under the onslaught of his hands and mouth and the dizzying closeness of his body her mind slipped into timeless oblivion.

The moments stretched out; she felt as taut as a harpstring, her body almost humming under his hands. Eyes shut tight, she clutched at the pillow, the edge of the mattress, his wrists, any anchor. But as minutes passed, she felt the exhilaration recede, a wave that had almost reached her but had slid away. She began to worry. _What's wrong with me? What if he thinks this is disgusting? This is reminding him that I'm just a messy human…_

Her body had gone tense and unresponsive and Edward pulled back, looking down at her furrowed brow. "Hey," he whispered into her ear, his fingers slowing, and her eyes snapped open worriedly. "What's wrong?"

She avoided his eyes. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just… um… it's just taking a little while. I'm sorry." She risked a glance at him, and he looked concerned.

"Are you enjoying it, though?" he asked.

"Oh God, yes," she said hurriedly. "But I'm worried that you're not. I don't want you to be bored… or… or grossed out or anything…" Her last words trailed away into embarrassed silence, and she glanced at him again. He was smiling. "What?" she asked, flushing even redder.

"How could you possibly think that I'm not enjoying myself?" he murmured in her ear. "I get to be pressed up against you –" here the stiffness pressed into her hip more insistently – "and I get to touch you and watch you and hear you make those incredibly erotic noises…" His fingers stroked her once, lightly, and she moaned involuntarily. Again he laughed low in her ear. "So just stop worrying, and let yourself feel." He shifted so that she was lying on her back, and he lay beside and above her. His knee trapped hers and spread her legs even farther apart. He kissed her and slipped another finger inside her to join the first, and the touch sent her mind spiraling away.

The wave was coming back, rising higher, bearing her upwards; she no longer had control of the little sounds coming from her mouth. She had done this before, of course, but always at night, always alone with the darkness on the inside of her eyelids; and no matter how vividly she had imagined him, nothing compared with the reality of him, the terrible intimacy of his touch in her most guarded places. The knowledge that he was touching her, he was seeing her reactions and hearing her sounds – that _he_ was causing this, and, incredibly, enjoying it – added a thrill that she had never felt, not even that afternoon on Edward's bed.

_That's it,_ she thought, riding the cresting wave. _He gave me something that day, but I was giving him something too, and this, this – this is harder, because he's giving and I'm not, and it's easy to be reciprocal but terrifying to just receive… _She was utterly open to him, utterly vulnerable, and he whispered in her ear, "Let go, beautiful girl," and she came undone.

The warmth flooded her, and her body arched against his. She bit down hard on her lip to keep from crying out, and there he was, his lips covering hers, and she was drowning.

The warmth ebbed; the rolling waves receded. Her whole body throbbed, and she was suddenly too sensitive and closed her thighs hard around his hand. He reluctantly withdrew his fingers, then wrapped his arms around her, holding her as she shuddered back toward him.

Feeling languid and sated, she opened her eyes to find him smiling – at her flushed skin, at her tangled hair, at the heaviness of her limbs. "Welcome back," he whispered, kissing her.

She smiled back, expecting to feel shy, but feeling only a sort of quiet elation. "I think I orbited the moon a few times," she whispered. "All the colors look different."

He laughed softly and went on stroking her hair. She curled against him, watching him. "I could return the favor, if you want," she said thoughtfully.

He shook his head. "No," he murmured. "This was just for you."

She raised her head to look at him more fully. "Are you sure?"

He looked at her steadily. "I'm sure," he said. "That was the best thing you could possibly have given me."

She considered this, then settled against him again. "Then we're even," she said.

He laughed quietly but didn't argue, and the sound of his laughter, clear and easy, unmixed with bitterness or sorrow, lifted Bella's heart. _He's happy,_ she thought, memories of the previous night's conversations coming back. _This decision has made him happy like I've never seen him before._

He lay with his eyes closed and a half-smile on his face, and she studied him, propping her head up on her hand. The fine straight nose, the angled jaw. The glorious mess of his hair with its threads of gold and copper and brown. The way his upper eyelashes shone gold where they sprang from his eyelid, darkening to brown at their ends, while the lower lashes were dark at the root and brightened to gold where the tips curved toward his cheek. The paradox of his skin, mineral-bright, marble-faceted yet yielding. She traced the planes of his face with her eyes, the high cheekbones, the profile like a sculptor's dream, the mobile lines of his mouth.

She was examining the soft double-ridged valley between his nose and lip when he opened one eye and peered at her. "What are you doing?"

"Memorizing you," she whispered. His eyes came fully open and he tightened his arms around her.

"I'm not going anywhere," he whispered fiercely.

"I believe you," she said, but continued her scrutiny, and he didn't contest her, sensing her need. _Give me this_, she pleaded silently, and he allowed her, watching her as she studied him. She drank him in, taking the sight of him and storing it away deep, writing it on herself as a tree writes its rings.

At last she smiled. "There," she said. "I have you."

"You have all of me," he whispered, and his eyes were serious.

She took in a breath and let it out slowly. "Edward, you know I don't like this."

She thought he might argue, but he looked down first. "I know," he said finally.

"There's so much uncertainty," she went on. "There are so many things that might go wrong. Can't we allow for the possibility that it's just better to go on the way we are? Or that I should be the one to change?"

He was shaking his head slowly. "I've spent so much time thinking about this," he said. "We've proven over and over that it's too dangerous to try to maintain this balance. I'm not perfect, Bella – it took me a long time to accept that, but now in a very real way I know I can't trust myself, not completely, not always."

She opened her mouth to argue, but the words died unspoken. It was true; it was the lesson they had both learned that day. _We were so naïve_, she thought.

"And in any case, I won't hear of you being turned," he continued. "You're human; it's who you are, and it would be a tragedy to take that from you. Anyone who knows you can see that you don't want it. You _shouldn't_ want it. No one should. This is no life."

He paused, but Bella could hear the words brewing, and she waited for him.

"Bella…" he said, and paused, a frown gathering in his eyes. "I'm done," he whispered. "I'm done with this. I'm done with the blood and the guilt and the fear and the constant battling. Ninety years I've been fighting to keep the monster in check. And I'm _tired._"

The sympathy in Bella welled up and over, and she pressed close to him and wound her fingers into his hair. "Edward…"

"I'm ready for this to be done," he said quietly. "I just want to lay this down. And you've given me the courage finally to try." He looked into her eyes, which were suddenly bright with tears. "But I won't, Bella, if you don't want me to. I've done enough of the decision-making for us, and I've often done a pretty terrible job. I'm finished with trying to control our lives – _your_ life. I won't go ahead with the change if you say no."

The hope flared up in her, painful and bright. She would say no, and he would be true to his word, and they would go on as they always had, and he would be careful with her, and she would squash her frustration, and they would live under cloud cover and in darkness while she grew old and he stood locked outside of time –

The pain in her breast wasn't hope after all, she realized, blinking back the tears. It was goodbye to their old life together.

She closed her eyes, and a tear slipped out. She felt him touch her cheek to wipe it away. He was still waiting for her to answer, she realized, and would wait forever, and at that thought another tear fell, but she opened her eyes and found his, and nodded.

"We have to try," she whispered shakily.

His eyes widened and the ghost of a smile of disbelief flitted over his face. "'We'?" he repeated.

"I'm certainly not letting you do this alone," she said fiercely.

The smile now dawned fully on his face. "I don't deserve you," he whispered. "I can't believe I found you after all this time. Perhaps the universe is benevolent after all."

It was too much, and she burrowed against his chest, hiding her face. "Edward," she whispered against him, "what if it doesn't work?"

He was silent for a moment. "If it doesn't work," he said at last, "then I'll be able to rest." She ached, but kept still. "And you'll move on with your life."

"My heart will be broken," she whispered. "Forever and ever."

"So will mine," he said. "But I can't make those promises anymore. I can't promise never to let you get hurt, or that you'll never get hurt because of me. No one can ever promise that, not really." He stroked her hair, and she heard the truth in his words._ He can't protect me from everything, _she thought. _And I don't want to be protected anymore. I don't want to be protected from _life.

With that realization, the last of her childhood fell away from her, like a silken robe slipping off her shoulders to puddle on the floor. She felt it go, and allowed herself a moment of grief, spun into the tangle of her emotions.

And then it was gone. _Enough_, she thought, and surged up to sitting. "If you're going to do this, then I'm going to help," she said. "I don't know how, but I'm going to find some way to contribute." She climbed off the bed and pulled on her jeans while he sat up, pushing covers away. "You know, it's going to be hard to sleep together in a single bed when you're human again," she said, "with you not being able to hold perfectly still for eight hours anymore and all." He looked startled, but relaxed when he saw her eyes sparkling. She went on, mock-seriously, "And I wonder if you snore."

He laughed and threw a pillow at her, which she caught and whipped back at him. After a brief and comically unmatched bout of wrestling, he slipped out her window and down to wait by her truck, while she danced to the bathroom and down the stairs.

Charlie was in the living room when she dashed through, eager to get outside to Edward. "Bye, Dad!" she said brightly.

"Hey, hey, hey – where are you off to, kiddo?" he asked, surprised by her exuberance.

"The Cullens'," she said without stopping. "Edward's home," she called over her shoulder, and slammed the door.


	8. Chapter 8

**My my my, it_ has_ been a while, hasn't it? Humblest apologies - sometimes the words, they flow, and sometimes, not so much. Right now they're flowing, so I'm taking them as far as they'll let me. At this point, I'm grateful if anyone is still reading at all! If you are, show me some love and leave a review. You're wonderful and I adore each and every one of you.  
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**Everything belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Come on, mllebojangles, play me something like Here Comes the Sun.  
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8

"…And that's how it's going to work," finished Edward.

A stunned silence met the end of his recitation. For a solid fifteen minutes, he had spun the tale for his assembled family, who seemed to have passed through various phases of shock and disbelief as he spoke. Alice had tried to interrupt, as had Emmett, but Carlisle kept them quiet. "Let Edward tell his story," he had said.

Bella had polished off the bagel they had stopped to buy on the way to the Cullens' house, but the coffee in her to-go cup had long since gone cold. When Edward had reached the part of the story where he stood before the four ancients in the ruined hall, Esme, who sat beside Bella on the sofa, reached over and took her hand, and held it for the rest of Edward's speech. Bella wasn't sure if this was for Esme's comfort, or her own, but she held it gratefully.

Jasper exhaled loudly into the silence. "I surely wasn't expecting this, Edward," he said.

Emmett made a sound somewhere between a growl and a snort. "Expecting this?" he barked. "How could we have been expecting this? Expecting you to commit suicide? I thought that phase was behind you." Edward's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

The tension was thick in the room. Esme said softly, "Carlisle, is it true? Can this truly work?"

Carlisle looked at her warily from his perch on the arm of Rosalie's chair. "Medically? I've never heard of such a thing, but there's no reason why it shouldn't work – _if_ our timing is perfect, and if the venom works the way the ancient ones said it does." Emmett started to speak again, but Carlisle cut him off. "I recognize that we're making assumptions. But this makes sense to me. The information Edward learned seems to fit with everything I've tried to learn about our kind in my three hundred years. This has the ring of truth for me."

"A ring of truth," snarled Emmett. "This is completely absurd."

"Easy, Em," said Jasper.

"You think this is a good idea?" Emmett burst out, staring at him incredulously. Jasper was the first to look away, and Emmett muttered darkly, "I thought so."

"It seems we haven't asked the one person who might know something definite," Esme said. She leaned around Bella and looked at Alice, who was sitting on the floor, curled like a cat at Jasper's feet. "Alice, my dear? Can you see anything?"

Alice, who had been staring at the ground, looked up unhappily and wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees. "It's a muddle," she said. "I can't tell, Edward."

"But you can see something," he said, standing rigidly by the mantelpiece.

She nodded, a deep frown between her brows. Jasper leaned forward unobtrusively and laid his hand on the nape of her neck, and she leaned back into his touch, seeming to draw strength from him. "I can see you starving yourself," she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "I can see your body shutting down, and believe me, the venom does not go easily. And then the future seems to split. I can see you unconscious on a hospital bed, and Carlisle working on you. I can see you awake and holding hands with Bella. And I can see you never waking up."

Bella shuddered, and Esme squeezed her hand.

"But you see the change happening," Edward pounced triumphantly on her words. "You see that the venom goes away and my heart starts beating, just like the old ones said it would."

"Yes, but I can't see past that," said Alice desperately. "Half the time I see you dead, Edward. _At least_ half the time. Whether it's because the transfusion doesn't work, or because your heart won't beat on its own, or because you never come out of the coma –"

"Does it even matter how it happens?" thundered Emmett. "You're equally dead."

"Emmett," said Carlisle, and although his voice was soft it carried a hint of warning. Emmett glared at him, but subsided.

"Alice?" asked Edward.

She looked up at him, amber eyes full of fear. "Don't do it, Edward," she said. "It's no better than fifty-fifty odds, at the very best."

Edward's face was a cold mask. "Then it's a fifty percent chance that I get to finish my life the way I want to," he said.

"Then at least don't do it now," Alice said, a thread of panic in her voice. "Wait until we know more about it. Wait until Carlisle can do some more research. What's the hurry? We have nothing _but_ time."

Edward stepped forward, his hands gripping the back of a chair unconsciously. "Not anymore," he said, and Bella heard the deep throb in his voice in her bones. "I never used to feel the passage of time. But now I can feel it slipping by, every second, and I feel I'm running to keep up. I'm in Bella's time now." His eyes found hers, and he held her gaze for a moment. She stared back hungrily, pouring as much of herself as she could into the connection between them. At last he broke away. "I know it may be the venom making me restless," he said with a glance at Carlisle. "But I don't see the logic in waiting. We know as much now as we're going to know. We have the capabilities here to deal with the medical needs of the transformation. And Bella…" He paused, searching for words. "Bella and I are the same physical age now. We won't be forever. This is my chance."

There was quiet in the room, and out of the corner of her eye Bella saw Rosalie's chin jerk down, as if she were nodding, once.

"Edward, my darling," said Esme, "no one questions your desire to be with Bella. But have you truly considered the pain you're going to be putting yourself through? However bad our transformations were, it sounds like this is going to be worse."

Alice shook her head violently, as if to clear away an unwanted vision; Edward looked at her sharply but didn't say anything. _He sees what's in her mind,_ Bella thought.

"And it's not only the pain," spoke up Jasper. "Have we forgotten that you're going to be starving yourself? We're sitting here calmly discussing the prospect of you driving yourself mad with thirst. You may be the paragon of self-control now, but I know a little something about that particular madness, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone."

"I also know the madness of thirst first-hand," said Carlisle, "and if any of us could survive it with sanity intact, it would be Edward. But if this is to work – and Alice's visions tell us that there is at least a chance of success – we must have everyone's cooperation. Everyone's support," he said, looking around at his assembled family, "and everyone's help."

There was a low rumble from Emmett's direction, but no spoken disagreement.

"Bella?" said Alice in her clear voice. "How do you feel about this?"

Bella felt rather than saw everyone's eyes turn toward her, and she fought not to shrink back into the couch cushions. "I…" she began, but her voice was rusty with disuse and anxiety, and she cleared her throat. "I'm terrified, to be honest," she said. "But I think Edward is right. We can't go on the way we have been – either I have to change, or he does. And I love you all – I really do – but I don't want to become one of you, not when there's the chance that Edward and I can spend our lives together." The unspoken words seemed to hang in the air: _spend our lives together, as humans._ She forged on. "I hate the idea of Edward suffering as much as the rest of you do. But if there's a chance that this will work –" she glanced up at Edward and Carlisle – "I have faith that we can make it happen. And I'm going to help however I can."

"As I see it, the venom has served its purpose," said Edward. "It kept me alive long enough to find Bella, and now I have no more need of it."

"That's a lovely romantic sentiment, but it will be little comfort for the rest of us if you die because of it," said Alice with uncharacteristic sharpness.

"It seems to me there's an easier solution," said Emmett darkly. "Bella should be turned. Hell, I'll do it myself."

Edward launched himself forward instantly with a protective snarl, and Emmett was on his feet in a movement too fast for Bella to see. Esme flung an arm across Bella's torso. In a heartbeat, Carlisle was standing in the center of the room between them, his hand flat on the center of Edward's chest. "Boys, enough," he said in a voice that brooked no dissent. "Edward, no one is doing anything of the sort, and you know that." He turned, and the fury was plain on his face. "Emmett, you will apologize to Bella, now, for what you said. It was threatening and inappropriate, and I will not have such ugly behavior under my roof."

The fight went out of Emmett at once, and his massive frame seemed to shrink. "I'm sorry, Bella," he said. "Edward, I'm sorry. You know I'd never… I'd never touch her." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and dropped back into his seat. "I'm just _worried_ for you," he said, his voice muffled. "I don't want to lose you. I don't see why things have to change."

"Things do have to change," said Jasper softly, unexpectedly. "Things are _supposed_ to change. We're the unnatural ones, never changing."

Bella's heart was pounding, and it sounded too loud in the silence that followed Jasper's words. She stood and went to Edward, wrapping her arms around his waist; his arm dropped around her shoulders, holding her tightly to his side.

"I want everyone to be in agreement," said Edward. "This affects everyone, and I want to know if you're behind me."

"I'm with you," said Jasper, again unexpected. Bella looked at him gratefully, and he smiled at her, a small smile not unmixed with sadness.

Alice let out a breath, her forehead still creased. "I don't like it," she said, leaning back against Jasper's legs. "But I'm with you too. But don't think I won't try to stop you if I see that the plan is going badly."

"Esme?" said Carlisle softly.

When she spoke, her voice was thick with sorrow. "What Emmett said is true. We _will_ lose you, whatever happens. If the transformation doesn't work, we lose you sooner, but even if it does work, we still lose you – we only put off the loss for seventy years or so." Edward's brows drew together as if he were in pain. "But I cannot in good conscience stand between you and the life you want for yourself and Bella," she said. "I will support you however I can."

Emmett heaved an angry sigh. "I suppose you want me to kiss and make up," he said. "Well, I won't. I hate this. But I have no say in the matter." He stood, scowling like a thundercloud. "So, fine. I'll watch you wither away. I'll pin you to the goddamn ground when you get crazy. But I'm going to be pissed off at you forever, do you hear me? Forever. And all things considered, that's not as empty a threat as it might be." He strode out of the room with heavy steps, and a moment later, a door slammed in the other end of the house, hard enough to rattle windows.

"Rosalie?" said Edward, his face impassive as if nothing had happened. Bella suddenly realized that only she had been silent through the entire discussion.

"He'll get over it," she said, her low voice musical and emotionless. "Yes, I'll help you."

Edward eyed her warily, and she stared back, her face as lovely and unrevealingly blank as a Venetian mask.

"And you know that you have my support," said Carlisle, "though I agree with Alice. Any sign that the transformation is not working, any vision she has that tells her that the future has changed, and we stop immediately. As long as there is still venom in your body, we can heal you."

"Understood," said Edward. Bella's arms tightened around his middle.

Later, upstairs with Bella in his room, Edward finally let his guard down. "Emmett is being an idiot, and that doesn't really surprise me," he said, sprawled on his leather couch, fidgeting with the fringed edge of a throw blanket. "But I wish Alice would come around. She even admitted that she saw the transformation working. I don't know why she won't look at it in a more positive light."

"I can understand her hesitation," said Bella, standing by the window, where she'd been looking out at the woods. The windows had been replaced since that afternoon, and unless she examined the slightly-less-full bookcases that lined the room – those books and cds that had been damaged too badly had evidently been discarded – there was no sign of the tumult that their lovemaking had caused. Of course, there was no sign of the beautiful wrought-iron bed either. "Fifty-fifty odds? That's not exactly reassuring." He looked up at her sharply, and she held up her hands to placate him. "I'm not backing out," she said. "But Alice and Carlisle are right. We have to be careful. You know that."

He was silent a moment, toying with the blanket. "I'm glad Esme and Jasper are being reasonable, at least," he said. Bella wasn't sure what she thought about Jasper at the moment, so she kept quiet. "Rosalie is a bit more of a puzzle," he went on. "She was hiding her thoughts from me earlier. But Emmett…" He scowled down at his hands. "I was hoping he'd stick with me, after all we've been through. I'm going to need his strength when the hunger gets harder to manage. But if he keeps acting like an imbecile –" the anger in his voice was rising – "and especially if Rosalie follows his lead, I don't know if I can trust him…"

There was an angry ripping sound, and suddenly the blanket in his hands had a long gash down the middle of it. He looked down at it in shock. Bella darted to his side and took his hands in hers, feeling the long fingers unclench from the fabric. "Hey, hey," she said softly. "It'll be ok. Emmett won't stay mad at you."

He didn't seem to be listening to her. "I didn't mean to do that," he murmured, still looking down at the blanket. His eyes came up to meet hers, and he looked strangely bewildered. "I didn't mean for that to happen," he repeated.

Bella was disconcerted – it was utterly strange to see him looking so lost. She gently touched his cheek, his hair, and his arms crept around her. She nestled into his side, and he bent to kiss her, softly at first, then with more hunger, the torn blanket forgotten. When she whimpered into his mouth, he pulled her around onto his lap, and his lips traveled to her ear, the line of her jaw, down the slope of her neck.

"You smell so good," he whispered, his cool breath hissing against her skin.

She let herself drift in the sensations of his kisses, his arms around her torso, holding her tightly. Holding her very tightly, in fact, and now it was him who was whimpering, his face pressed open-mouthed against her throat, inhaling deeply as if he wanted to breathe her in, all of her down to her very bones, and his arms around her tightening further–

And the door to his room banged open, and there was Alice, who said shrilly, "Edward!"

He didn't let go, but his arms loosened, and he let his head fall back against the back of the couch. "I know," he said, resignation in his voice. Bella, blushing deeply, looked back and forth between him and Alice, knowing she was missing something.

Alice frowned unhappily but didn't say anything. Edward sighed, releasing Bella completely, and she edged off his lap. He stood, running a hand through his hair. "Nothing would have happened," he said at last. "I wouldn't have let anything happen."

Bella felt suddenly cold. She touched the place on her neck where his mouth had been pressed.

"I can't be too careful," said Alice, looking stricken. "This is my responsibility too, now. You made it a responsibility for all of us when you told us this morning."

"Yes," he said softly. And then, even more softly, "Thank you."

She sighed, brushing a spiky black lock out of her eyes. "Don't thank me yet," she said. "I still have to get you through something much worse."

"What's that?" asked Bella.

Alice glanced at her, then back at Edward. "School," she said.


	9. Chapter 9

**Here's where I'd put the obligatory apology for being so slow. I'm not even going to bother. =) You know the drill. At this point, I'm thrilled if anyone reads this at all! Writing this story began as an attempt to exorcise the Twilight demons from my brain - anything else is just icing on the cake. Thank you so much for reading. Mllebojangles! Say it loud and there's music playing; say it soft and it's almost like praying.**

**SMeyer owns Twilight, not me. If I did, I'd be somewhere warm and tropical, not burrowed under fifteen layers of blankets during yet another snowpocalypse.  
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**9

"Don't look so panicked, Bella," said Edward. "It's going to be fine. I'm fine."

Alice may not have forgotten about school, but Bella had, and as the three of them climbed out of Edward's car, the knot of anxiety in her stomach took on new dimensions. "I don't understand why Carlisle insisted you come back to school," she grumbled, looking around for the curious stares that would surely start any moment. "Why take the risk? Why can't you stay home?"

"Appearances," murmured Alice, who looked nearly as apprehensive as Bella felt. "Until he absolutely can't manage it, he should be in school. We're supposed to be like any other high school kids."

"Not to mention the fact that this is going to be my last time through high school, and my grades actually count this time," said Edward as they walked toward the school. "If I'm lucky, I can finish out the year."

Bella frowned. That was still months away. She didn't know if she hoped they still had that much time before his transformation began in earnest, or that it would all be over by then. The cold fear in her belly gave a little flip.

"Let's just deal with today, shall we?" said Alice softly. They were approaching the front doors of the school, and the conversations around them were already trailing off, the eyes following them.

Bella snuck a sideways glance at Edward. Despite the sharp hollows around his eyes and under his cheekbones, despite the nervous energy in his frame, his otherworldly beauty shone like a beacon that cast every other face into shadow. Around him, other people blurred, formless and forgettable, even as their eyes were inexorably drawn to him. Bella felt it happening to herself as the stares slid past her on their way to Edward and Alice. She didn't mind being a bit forgettable herself – certainly she never sought her classmates' stares – but she hated the curiosity, the intensity of their attention, as if having so much psychic energy focused on him at once might precipitate whatever crisis they were building toward. "Do you have to be so… so _visible?_" she groused.

He laughed, clearly the only one of them at ease, and pulled her close with an arm around her shoulders. "Poor Bella," he said. "We're almost done with this. With _all_ of this." He pressed a kiss against her temple. She fought the urge to mold herself against his side, torn between his instantaneous magnetic pull and the embarrassment she felt under the gaze of the people all around. He seemed to feel no such compunction, his lips lingering near her ear, his hips swiveling toward her.

"Easy," murmured Alice. Edward sighed into Bella's hair.

Tearing her eyes away from him, desperate to distract herself, Bella caught sight of a familiar dark head a short way down the hall. Angela. She squirmed out from under Edward's arm.

"I'll see you in first period, ok?" she said, answering their quizzical looks. "I have to go talk to someone."

Alice looked like she was going to speak, but Bella turned and made her way determinedly toward Angela before she could lose her nerve. There was mercifully no sign of Lauren or Jessica, for which Bella was grateful. _One chance to get this right,_ she told herself.

Angela was pulling a textbook out of her locker when Bella arrived at her side. She hesitated, and Angela stiffened, seeming to catch a glimpse of Bella out of the corner of her eye. "Hi, Angela," she managed.

Angela stuffed the book in her bag and turned to face her fully. "What do you want, Bella?" she asked, her voice guarded, challenging.

Bella swallowed, not feeling reassured. "Um… can I talk to you for a minute?"

Angela didn't reply, but she also didn't walk away.

Bella forged on. "I want to apologize," she said. "I just wanted to say that –"

"Then say it," said Angela flatly. Bella blinked, taken aback. "You want to apologize. You want to say. Just say it, will you?"

The uncharacteristic harshness in her voice tore at Bella's heart. She seemed to be unable to look up from the floor. "I'm sorry," she said, her voice sounding small and pathetic in her own ears. "I've been an idiot and a jerk and a horrible friend. I wasn't thinking about anyone's happiness but my own. Nobody deserves to be treated the way I treated you."

She risked a look up at Angela, who was looking away, but seemed to be listening. Bella continued. "I somehow had myself convinced that you didn't really mind that I wasn't seeing you so much – not that that excuses anything," she added hurriedly, "but I want you to know that I didn't try intentionally to hurt you." Still Angela was silent, and Bella felt the dismissal in her silence. "That's all I wanted you to know," she said, and turned to go.

"I really enjoyed the time we spent together," said Angela softly, and Bella whirled back, searching Angela's face. "I felt like we were getting really close. And I'm not –" She broke off, looking away with a pained expression. "I'm not that good at making friends. I mean, Jess and Lauren and I have known each other since kindergarten, and you don't really _choose_ each other at that age, you know? You just get thrown together. And the fact that you _chose_ to be friends with me meant a lot." Bella swallowed hard, feeling the guilt lump up in her throat. "Which meant that it hurt a lot when Alice came back and you stopped paying any attention to me."

"I know, and I'm so sorry –" Bella broke in, but Angela cut her off, shaking her head.

"Whatever," she said, but the harshness was gone from her voice, leaving just sadness. "I know Alice and Edward are really important to you." She was looking away down the hall, and Bella followed her gaze to where Edward stood near Alice's locker. He shone like a cut jewel in the drab surroundings. Bella's heart caught and stuttered.

"So he's finally back," Angela said, jolting Bella back to the present.

"Yeah," she answered. She heard the softness in her own voice, and blushed. Angela was looking at her with something like envy.

"I'm happy for you," she said. "I really am." She fidgeted where she stood. "I have to get to class."

"Angela," Bella burst out, on impulse, "can we sit with you at lunch?"

Angela blinked, obviously surprised. "Um. I guess so – if they – if you really want." She paused, and the corner of her mouth lifted in the barest hint of a wry smile. "Jess will be excited," she said softly.

Bella giggled, startled, and a chuckle escaped from Angela as if by accident. Something passed between them in that moment, a ghost of the easy camaraderie that Bella remembered from afternoons spent together, from drives in her truck, from the hours of gossip and laughter. In an instant Angela seemed to feel it too, but she stiffened, drawing in on herself, smile vanishing. Bella felt the twist of guilt again.

"I'll see you around, Bella," she said, and turned and disappeared in the crowd.

Bella watched her go, unhappily. They were a long way off from forgiveness. She had done so much to ruin Angela's trust, and if she were honest with herself, how was she planning to make it up to her? With Edward back, was she any more likely to play the part of the good friend?

She turned to go to her class, and caught sight of Alice across the hall, leaning in an open doorway with an accusatory look. _Lunch_, Bella thought, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. _This should be interesting._ She steeled herself, and walked toward her. Edward and Alice were going to have to get used to the fact that she had other friends too, and that was that.

* * *

Lunch _was_ interesting. The buzz of voices in the cafeteria dipped when they entered, then righted itself; eyes followed them as they made their way across the room, Bella in the lead, Edward and Alice flanking her a bit behind. Angela hadn't told anyone that they were coming, and Bella caught her mischievous smile, quickly hidden, as they pulled chairs up to the table. Jessica's eyes nearly bugged out of her head when Edward sat down beside her.

_No one killed anybody,_ thought Bella afterward as she sat in history class, _and no one is the wiser about what Alice and Edward are._ By now Alice was an expert at making food disappear off her plate without actually eating it, and Edward was quickly learning to mimic her. There had been uncomfortable moments, to be sure. There had been awkward pauses, as well as some thinly-veiled snark from Lauren and Mike, deftly deflected by Alice, who was making a genuine effort to take an interest in Bella's friends. Edward, however, seemed to have no conversational setting between all-absorbed intensity and steely silence. It was almost comical watching him attempt small talk.

She herself had sat beside Angela, both of them uneasy and quiet as the talk washed around them, but they shared some glances and a few words, and Bella breathed a bit more easily. Maybe there was a way back to friendship for them after all.

Conversation had soon come around to the Cullens' long absence, however, and they found themselves answering eager questions about their trip around the world. Bella had listened in amazement as Edward and Alice wove a convincingly detailed narrative of a trip in a yacht around the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean. Alice had the whole table laughing with a tale about a misunderstanding with a hotel concierge somewhere in the Greek islands. Bella had laughed right along, almost convinced of the truth of their stories herself.

_They probably have seen and done everything they were talking about,_ she thought, taking down some half-hearted notes while the history teacher talked about the Bay of Pigs crisis. _They didn't have to invent their stories – they've had lifetimes to explore the world. And Edward is willing to give that up for me, the little girl who hasn't done anything, hasn't been anywhere._ She chewed worriedly on the end of her pen.

As if he could truly hear her thoughts, Edward, sitting beside her, found her hand under the desk and held it, his thumb stroking over her knuckles. She smiled at him gratefully, and he smiled back at her, a smile so full of simple joy that its beauty took her breath away. At least he was still radiating that wonderful clear happiness. Bella found herself unable to look away from him. _I can't lose him. I can't._

He turned her hand over on her knee under the desk and began tracing little circles on her palm. Her body responded instantly, and she shifted in her seat, face flushing, snapping her attention back to the front of the room.

He laughed silently, no doubt relishing her body's reaction. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him take his pen and write in the margin of his mostly-blank notebook, _Pay attention in class, young lady._

She hastily suppressed a snort of indignation. _You pay attention,_ she wrote in her own margin_. Quit distracting me._

_I don't need to,_ he wrote. _I remember the Bay of Pigs – C moved us all to Canada. I could be teaching this class._

Bella grimaced. Edward stifled a laugh. Alice glared at them.

* * *

For all his light spirits, Bella could see the strain on Edward, and it was getting stronger. Every day he seemed stretched a bit thinner, a bit tighter, with flashes of impatient and almost manic energy that he battled to control. Bella watched him endlessly, as did Alice. Every morning when they pulled up in the car to pick her up for school, Bella sought Alice's eyes, looking for the reassurance in her glance. _He'll be ok for one more day,_ that guarded amber gaze seemed to say. _It won't be today._ As the days passed and became weeks, however, the look in Alice's eyes became less sure, and more anxious. There always seemed to be a worried crease between her eyebrows now, and Bella felt her face mirroring Alice's.

Edward himself seemed to be turning inward, focusing all his energy on himself and on Bella, as if the sphere of his world were contracting down to a single point. The clarity of his happiness took on a fierce, brittle edge. When he and Bella found moments alone, his caresses were harder than they had been, possessive and urgent. Bella thrilled to his touch but often found herself close to tears, the desperation of her love pressing against her breastbone until she thought her chest couldn't contain it.

He was drawing out, attenuating, and somehow seemed less and less human as the days went by – paler, thinner, impossibly still in lethargy, impossibly fast in activity. The skin over his bones seemed drawn as taut as a kite over its frame; his cheekbones, the ridge of his eyebrow, the line of his jaw looked like they could cut glass. Bella saw people flinch from meeting his eyes – two black holes that might swallow all the light in the world – without seeming to notice what they were flinching from. In fact, she wondered more and more how people could even continue to fool themselves that he was human at all. Surely someday soon, someone would look at him and scream _vampire!_ and the whole school would run screaming, like a scene from an old B-movie.

_People are so blind,_ she thought. _We can't even see what's in front of us._

And through it all, he held himself tightly bound, his self-control encasing him like a suit of armor.

One night he told her that he didn't think he should stay in her room while she slept. She swallowed hard and asked if Alice had seen something.

"No," he said. "This is my own choice. I don't think we should take any risks."

She nodded, feeling cold, and she hugged him fiercely when he stepped forward to embrace her. He pressed a kiss against her forehead and was gone, and the rustling branches of the tree outside her window were the only sign that he had been there. As she lay alone later, her narrow bed feeling like a great empty expanse, a few tears slid from her cheek to her pillow, but he was truly gone, because he didn't come back to comfort her.

The next morning she woke feeling disoriented. She dressed hurriedly, anxious for Alice and Edward to arrive, and slipped downstairs and out the door while Charlie was still slumped blearily over his coffee at the kitchen table. She stood with her back to the front door, hugging herself in the cold damp morning air, listening to the mist dripping off the eaves. When she realized she had been waiting for almost fifteen minutes, she frowned and reached into the pocket of her bag to rummage for the keys to her truck. Had they forgotten? Had something happened? Anxiety tightened in her stomach, but just as her fingers closed around her keys, the sleek silver car came around the corner and purred up to her driveway. Bella dropped the keys in relief and ran toward the car, eager to see Edward.

He climbed out of the car to give her a kiss, and the tension in his lean frame was almost visible. Bella slid into the backseat with him, saying, "Hi, Alice."

"Good morning, Bella," said Alice, but the tone of her voice sounded worried and weary, and she wouldn't turn to meet Bella's eyes.

It was a quiet ride to school, Alice gripping the steering wheel, Edward holding Bella's hand and staring stonily out the window. Bella looked between them, feeling even more awkward and uneasy than usual, wondering what was going on.

Edward barely said a word all morning, and Bella clung mutely to his side, hating his silence, hating how meek and nervous she felt. He seemed to be pulling away from her and she didn't know what was wrong. Alice was watching him like a hawk.

In third period physics, the three of them sat at a lab table toward the back of the room. Bella struggled to pay attention, but her mind felt skittish and jittery. Mr. Williams' voice droned like a dentist's drill, the ticking of the clock over the door was unconscionably loud, and her own breathing seemed heavy and painful in her ears.

And then she became aware of Edward where he sat beside her. He was whispering something, almost too softly for her to hear at first, but her ears gradually picked it up, like a radio station coming into focus.

"Alice," he was whispering. "It's everywhere. Alice. It's everywhere. I need it. It's everywhere. Alice. I need it. It's everywhere."

His body was curled almost double where he sat on his lab stool, coiled like a spring. The pencil in his hands had been reduced to splinters and dust. Bella's skin crawled, and she found herself leaning away. _It's the blood_, she thought, terrified. _He's going to snap._

Alice had abandoned any pretense of paying attention to the class. Her hands were on Edward's arm, her eyes locked on his, obviously speaking silently into his mind with all her might. When she broke eye contact for one moment to pull out her phone and send a lightning-fast text, his breath hitched, and his head whipped around, wildly scanning the room. Bella recoiled.

"Alice," she hissed, "you need to get him out of here – he's going to –"

Too many things happened in the next instant for Bella to follow. Alice cried, "Mr. Williams!" Everyone in the room turned to look. Edward surged out of his seat, nearly snarling, and several students nearby jumped at his sudden motion, but Alice somehow trapped his arms, redirecting his movement toward the door. "Edward is sick," she continued, her bell-like voice piercing through the surprised murmuring. "I'm taking him to the nurse."

Somehow she had already maneuvered him out the door, and Bella was on her feet, following. She had gone a few steps after them down the hall, when Mr. Williams said crisply from the doorway, "Miss Swan!"

She wheeled around. His arms were folded over his chest. "Alice can take her brother to the nurse without your help. Come back to class."

She bit her lip, and turned to watch their progress, torn. Edward was leaning heavily against Alice as he wove his way unsteadily down the hall, looking for all the world like a queasy teenager headed for the nurse's office. There were two tall figures waiting in a shadowy corner at the end of the hall, and Bella squinted to make them out – could that be Emmett and Jasper?

"_Now_, Miss Swan, unless you'd like detention this afternoon," Mr. Williams said.

He had her trapped, and she knew it. She went slowly toward the classroom, looking over her shoulder long enough to see the two tall shapes take Edward's arms and whisk him away. Alice glanced back at her, then was gone.

Mr. Williams resumed class, but Bella didn't hear a word he said. Feeling sick and shaky, she hid her phone under her desk and sent Alice a text message.

**Is he ok?**

It was almost fifteen long minutes – during which time she chewed three fingernails down to the quick, a habit she had kicked years ago – until the phone buzzed in her hand, and she stabbed at the buttons in her haste to read Alice's reply. **We're at home. He's ok – he's with Carlisle.** It vibrated again almost immediately with another text: **Realize you don't have a ride. I'll pick you up after school.**

Bella typed back swiftly, **Can't you come get me any sooner?** Detention threats or no, she didn't think she could stay in school another minute.

There was a pause, and she imagined Alice looking at the clock, considering. **I don't think that's a good idea. Sorry, B.**

Bella dropped her phone in her lap and slumped forward, her elbows on the table. They were going to strand her here, out of sight and out of mind. She longed to know what was going on. Had Edward's mind snapped along with his self-control? Was he giving up? And what if Alice hadn't been there to stop him – what might have happened then?

The rest of the day was torture; Bella felt herself aging a year for every hour she spent staring at the clock, drumming her fingers on desks, moving her unseeing eyes over books and papers and blackboards.

At lunch she filled her tray, alone, and walked toward the usual table. As she came up behind her friends, she caught part of their conversation.

"No," Mike was saying, "I swear he jumped up first. And he was almost growling. What a freak."

"No, I really think that Alice yelled out for the teacher first," insisted Lauren.

"Yeah, it was like she knew he was going to jump out of his seat," said Jessica.

Eric laughed. "God, it's like who shot first – Han or Greedo."

Mike started to argue right away. "Oh, come on – everybody knows Han shot first." There was general laughter and Tyler called them both nerds, and in the commotion Bella slipped away unseen. No one had noticed her without Alice and Edward flanking her, and in that moment she felt the futility of what she had been trying to do, uniting the Cullens with her human friends. There was too wide a gulf, and some differences could never be bridged.

She dumped her tray, appetite gone, and found an empty bench in a remote hallway where she could wait out the lunch hour. She was beginning to feel worn as thin as Edward – pulled in all directions, but unable to make real claims on anyone.

_Let this be over soon,_ she thought. _Please let this be over soon._


	10. Chapter 10

**Hellooo you wonderful people! Thank you for reading! You're the best! Sorry for the unrelenting angst!  
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**Ooh mllebojangles, you make me live.**

**SMeyer owns everything you recognize - which, really, is most of it.**

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**10

When Alice pulled up to the house, Bella barely waited for the car to stop before she leapt out and ran up the front walk. She burst in through the front door, yelling, "Edward?"

"He's with Carlisle," said Jasper from the living room, jerking his head in the direction of Carlisle's study.

"Hi, Bella," said Emmett.

Bella didn't stop to return his greeting before heading for the study at a dead run. The door was open.

Edward was slumped on the sofa against Esme, who was stroking his hair with a worried look on her face. Carlisle was perched on the edge of his desk with a book open in his hands. All three of them looked up as Bella arrived, breathing heavily. Alice drifted in behind her and stood in the doorway.

"Bella," said Edward, getting up and putting his arms around her. She buried her face against his chest and breathed in his familiar smell with a sigh of relief. He seemed to be all angles and edges in her arms, but he was there, and he was whole.

"I was so worried about you," she mumbled into his chest.

He pulled back and looked down at her. "I know," he said. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I freaked out in class, and I'm sorry I wasn't in touch afterwards. I only really got calmed down a little while ago." He released her and collapsed back onto the couch, scrubbing a hand through his hair. Bella sat beside him, uneasy, and Esme wordlessly took his hand.

"It was the blood, wasn't it?" said Bella. "Before you snapped. You were saying, 'It's everywhere.' You were talking about the blood, right? The hunger has gotten that bad?"

Edward nodded, miserably. "I thought I could control myself."

"There are certain things that are beyond our strength, Edward," said Carlisle somberly.

"You should have told us it had gotten so bad," said Esme. "We had no idea."

"Does…" began Bella hesitantly. "Does my blood… bother you too?"

Edward turned to her, meeting her eyes with a pained expression. "No, Bella, of course not," he said. "Never that. Never again."

_But Carlisle just said that there are things beyond our strength,_ she thought. The words seemed to hang unspoken in the air.

Alice spoke up from the doorway. "What worries me most is that I couldn't see it coming. I knew this morning that something was wrong, but my vision was muddled. I didn't know until the instant before you snapped that anything definite was going to happen." She paused, and the frustration was evident on her delicate face as she searched some inner landscape for signs.

"One thing is for certain, and that is that you cannot go back to school," said Carlisle. Edward drew breath to protest, but Carlisle held up his hand. "Only Alice's quick action today prevented tragedy. This is not a reflection on you – in fact, I am amazed that you have done as well as you have. But I cannot in good conscience allow you to put the other children in danger."

Edward sighed. "It was only two more months. I would have graduated."

"I'll take care of it with the school," said Esme. "We'll have to tell them that you're sick. We can figure out a way for you to keep turning in your work from home – I can tell them that I'm tutoring you."

"Alternatively, we could call this whole suicide mission off," said Alice testily. He scowled in her direction, but she continued. "Edward, it _scares_ me that I can't see what's going to happen to you. Something about this – something about what you're doing – is clouding up my vision. I can't see you clearly now. Do you really want to keep on with this madness if we're flying blind?"

"Has something changed in your vision of the future?" Carlisle asked.

"No," said Alice unhappily. "I still see the same split possibilities. It's just getting harder to see… harder to see Edward himself. He's all blurry now, somehow. I can't see what's going to happen to him until just before it happens. I couldn't tell you what he's going to do later today, or tomorrow, or next week, like I could with any of you if I focused on you hard enough. It's just muddy now, and I don't know why."

"Maybe it's because what he's doing doesn't make sense to your vampire vision," said Bella suddenly.

"What do you mean, Bella?" asked Carlisle, frowning.

"Well, your visions are part of your vampire powers, right?" she asked Alice. Alice nodded assent. "Maybe those powers just can't fathom Edward's transformation. Like on some level, you yourself can't believe what's going on."

"Because it's completely antithetical to our nature," Carlisle murmured.

"That doesn't make sense," said Alice.

"No, it makes perfect sense," said Edward. "Your vision mostly has to do with our kind, right?"

"Yes, but I can also see human actions. Bella's, for instance."

"That's true. But you were never able to see the Quileutes – and in a way, they too are antithetical to us," said Edward.

"Even if that is true, it doesn't make me feel much better," said Alice, frowning. "It doesn't change the fact that we won't know what's happening to you until it happens."

"Which is how the world is supposed to work!" burst out Edward. "Maybe we have gotten too complacent, always knowing what is going to happen! It's so comfortable having that advantage, isn't it? It's so easy to make decisions when we know in advance that they're the right ones! So you can't see the future about this one thing. You know, that's how everyone else has to make their decisions all the time."

Alice looked hurt, and Esme made a sound of protest. Edward relented. "I'm sorry, Alice. You have always been our safety net. Just because the safety net is gone doesn't mean I'm going to give up."

"I understand," she said softly. "It just scares me. That's all."

Carlisle stood up from the edge of the desk, clapping shut the large book in his hands. "Perhaps Alice can't see the future, but that doesn't mean we can't plan for it." He tossed the book into Edward's lap. Bella looked at the cover: _Blood Transfusion in Clinical Medicine._ "We need a strategy," continued Carlisle, going to a bookshelf and pulling down more books, "and strategy requires research. If I were performing any other dangerous and complex medical procedure, I would have a team of doctors reading and preparing and planning. Here I have something much better –" he grinned at them – "my family."

Esme smiled. "Most of us _have_ been to medical school at least once."

Alice examined the organic chemistry reference that Carlisle handed her. "Didn't Rosalie get really excited about neuroscience at one point?"

"Back in the seventies," said Esme, nodding. "When women were finally making their way into graduate programs in the sciences."

"And Jasper was so angry when we had to move away from Massachusetts before he finished his microbiology degree," said Edward. "It took him years to get over that."

"So we make a plan," said Carlisle, "and when the transformation begins in earnest, we'll be as prepared as we can."

"I want to help," spoke up Bella. She felt the eyes turn to her. "I mean, I haven't been to medical school or anything, but I'm going to go crazy if I can't help somehow."

"Of course, Bella," said Carlisle, smiling. "We will need everyone's help, and we can start right now."

Together they transformed the dining room into a sort of control center. The vast gleaming dining table, generally unused, was soon covered with books, papers, a cluster of open laptops, charts and sketches and ledgers. Rosalie and Jasper argued about the best way to wire up the network of computers; Emmett contributed a huge whiteboard from his room.

In all the commotion, Bella never noticed when Edward slipped away, but she did realize that she hadn't seen him for several minutes, and she went looking for him. She found him nearby in the living room, sitting wearily on the sofa with one long hand over his eyes. She sat down beside him. He never moved, but he seemed hyperaware of her presence. His very skin was listening to her.

"Is it so bad?" she asked softly.

He didn't answer right away, but after a moment his hand dropped into his lap and he met her eyes. The blackness, as always, startled her.

"It's very bad," he said.

She took his hand, not knowing what to say. He played idly with her fingers as he spoke. "I feel like my body is at war with itself. Sometimes I want to tear myself to pieces, just for an end to the hunger."

Bella winced. He saw, and reached up to stroke her cheek, as gently as if it were made of eggshell.

"Sometimes it's manageable," he said, turning his attention back to her hand, which lay curled in his, "but sometimes I feel like I'm burning alive, from the inside out. There are moments that I start to panic and I know I'm going to die unless I drink right away. This morning was one of those times." He paused, and the pain was clear on his face. "It was too much for me to handle. The worst part, though, was feeling myself slipping away – feeling the thirst take over my mind. Part of me wanted to stop it, but part of me wanted nothing more than to snap, to drink…" _To kill,_ thought Bella, though she stayed silent.

His eyes were trained on their interwoven hands, and she looked down. He was tracing the branching veins on the back of her hand with his fingertips, over and over. She stiffened instantly, her hand closing involuntarily into a fist, and she turned her hand over, but the result was only to expose the translucent skin of her wrist where the dark indigo lines showed even more clearly. She started to pull away, but he held her hand, gently but inexorably.

"Bella." His voice was soft, and she looked up into his face. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I can't. You're what I want most in the whole world."

_In far too many ways,_ she thought. But she left her hand in his grip, willed her muscles to loosen, and told him that she loved him, which was, after all, the truth.

* * *

This became her new reality. She went to sleep alone; she woke alone. She went to school, and she talked to Alice; she sat with her friends at lunch and tried to stay involved in their conversations. After school she went to the Cullens' where she sat with Edward and did homework, and when she finished her homework she read books from Carlisle's bookshelf about transfusions, about blood types, about circulatory systems and blood-borne pathogens. She didn't understand everything she read, but she began keeping notes, and Carlisle patiently answered her questions, which she asked with more and more confidence. She went home and had dinner with Charlie, and tried to fill the long evening hours with mindless activity. She went to sleep alone; she woke alone.

* * *

Bella's locker wouldn't open. She tried for the third time, but it stayed stubbornly closed. She wanted to yell in exasperation, but instead she bit the inside of her cheek and started entering the combination yet again.

Lunch had been painful. Lauren had been particularly unpleasant; apparently Jeffrey Lewis, the boy she'd lately had her eye on lately, had asked someone else to the prom, and she took out her spitefulness on Bella instead. She had asked pointed questions about Edward, whispered suggestively behind her hand to Jessica, walked roughshod over the conversation when Alice tried to change the subject. Alice had squeezed Bella's hand under the table. Bella wondered why Alice continued to put up with it.

_It's because of me,_ she thought. _She puts up with them for my sake; there's no other explanation._ And why did she herself continue to put up with the meanness, the obliviousness? There were times when she was hard-pressed to give herself any reason.

The padlock finally fell open in her hand, and she yanked her bookbag around off her shoulder, emptying it of books and stuffing more in. She didn't want to be in school; she didn't want to be anywhere but at the Cullens', with Edward, sitting near him, talking to him, touching his hand occasionally, making the most of whatever time they had left –

"Hey, Bella," came a soft voice beside her, and she jumped. It was Angela.

"Oh. Hey," she answered.

Angela fidgeted. "I'm sorry Lauren was being so awful at lunch today," she said. Bella shrugged. "I think she's just jealous of you – of what you and Edward have," she added.

Bella snorted. "Really? That seems pretty unlikely. I think she just doesn't like me."

It was Angela's turn to shrug, looking off into the middle distance. Bella felt awkward. Her relationship with Angela still hadn't settled back into the comfortable friendship it had once been.

"How is Edward?" Angela asked.

"He's ok," said Bella automatically.

Angela looked skeptical. "Is he really?" she asked. "He's been out for a while now. I know when he first started missing school, Alice said something about a disease he caught when he was traveling."

Feeling profoundly uncomfortable, Bella avoided Angela's eyes. "Um. Yeah. They think he got bitten by something." She zipped up her bookbag. "His dad thinks he might miss the rest of the year."

"Wow," said Angela softly, the concern plain on her face. "Jeez, Bella, I'm so sorry. But he's going to be ok, right? He's not going to –"

_He's not going to die, is he?_ Angela gulped back the rest of the sentence, but Bella heard the words hang in the air as plainly as if they had been spoken aloud. She found herself blinking fiercely at tears. "I don't know, Angela," she said, her voice trembling. "I… I hope he'll be all right. But I don't know."

"Oh God," said Angela. "I had no idea." Bella saw the enormity of what she had said dawning in Angela's eyes, and the stress and anxiety of the past days hit her all at once. Numb, she let Angela pull her into a hug. "Let me know if there's anything I can do, ok?" Unable to speak, Bella just nodded, and together they moved off toward their classrooms.

After that, no one asked about Edward again, and when conversation drifted in that direction, whoever was speaking would get an uncharacteristically fierce glare from Angela. Bella wasn't sure whether she preferred this new arrangement. She knew Angela meant it kindly, but there were times when she felt that Edward had disappeared from their lives as easily as if he had never existed. The thought of him disappearing from her own life, so fully, so neatly, kept her awake through long hours of darkness.

* * *

She spent afternoons sitting beside Edward at the dining room table, reading book after book from Carlisle's shelf. She filled one notebook and started another, then filled that one as well. One evening she realized she had looked over a whole chapter's worth of pictures of needles and intravenous injection sites and blood transfusion bags without flinching once. The dining room was getting crowded; medical equipment was arriving bit by bit, monitors and rolling carts hung with cords and wires, bins of small packages in sterile wrappings, a CPR dummy whose blank sexless face made Bella uneasy.

She leaned back in her chair, stretching until her back cracked, and Edward looked up and gave her a tired smile. She got up and kissed him on the forehead, and felt him freeze in his chair. Keeping her movements slow and careful, she stroked his hair once and moved away without saying a word. Their tacit truce held, minute by minute.

On the way back from the bathroom, Bella overheard low voices from the kitchen as she walked through the shadowy hallway. It was Jasper and Emmett.

"He looks so awful," Emmett was saying. "Honestly, he looks like he's dying. There are times I want to just bring a damn deer in here for him and end this whole thing–"

"Bella," said Jasper softly, a warning in his tone. She had paused involuntarily just behind the doorjamb, but he must have heard her, so she stepped into the light. Emmett looked mortified.

"I'm sorry," he said sheepishly. "I shouldn't have said that."

"It's ok," she said automatically. She cleared her throat and spoke with more sincerity in her voice. "Don't worry about it, Emmett. I'm worried about him too." She moved off down the hall, but she felt their eyes follow her, and she straightened her back a trifle. She felt as if she were watching herself in a play, noble and tragic, the widow, the bereft.

Still preoccupied, she reached the dining room and sat down in her chair, moving swiftly, unthinking, stirring the air. Edward had been twirling a pen in his fingers, and it dropped from his hand, clattering first to the tabletop then to the floor. His whole body coiled on itself, and he gripped the edge of the table with both hands so hard that it cracked and splintered. A horrible strangled sound came from his throat. _Not again, not again, please not now,_ Bella thought, horrified, trying to scramble away, her feet tangling with the legs of the chair.

There was a crash somewhere on the other side of the house, and Alice appeared in the doorway, followed closely by Jasper. A heartbeat later she was at Edward's side, seizing him by the shoulders. "Edward!" she shrilled in his ear.

He convulsed once, like a rubber band snapping, and he let out a great breath all at once. Slowly, slowly, the tension went out of his body. He was panting as if he'd run a race.

"I'm ok," he whispered. Looking up and meeting Alice's eyes, he repeated, "I'm ok, Alice."

Bella stood, shaking. "Maybe I should go."

"No!" said Edward vehemently, seizing her wrist with a grip like a vise. She started, and he loosened his grip, but still held her firm. "Don't leave," he said more gently. "Please, Bella. I need you here. I need to remember." She didn't move, and he said softly, "Don't leave me."

She didn't. She couldn't. She held his hand while his trembling subsided, and her heart gradually returned to its normal pace. Neither of them read any more that night, but they sat facing each other in their chairs, one of her knees trapped between his. He held her hands and they talked softly. Occasionally he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to hers, his breath mingling with hers.

Alice sat near them, watching him closely. After that day they were never alone.

* * *

The very next afternoon Alice drove Bella to the Cullens' after school, as usual. They were a few minutes from the house when Alice suddenly gripped the steering wheel harder and said, "Oh, no."

Bella had been lost in her own thoughts. She jumped, saying, "What? What's wrong?"

Alice pressed down on the accelerator and the car jumped forward. "Oh, please no," she said, then glanced over at Bella, who was growing increasingly frantic. "It's not Edward," she said, and Bella's fists unclenched from where they had involuntarily clutched the armrests. "But we need to get home. Oh, I can't believe it."

Bella badgered her for more information, but Alice wouldn't say more. They pulled up to the house with a screech and Alice dashed into the house, Bella following as quickly as she could.

Edward and Carlisle were in the dining room. Edward had his head propped on one hand, and he looked up wearily and smiled when they came in.

"Where are –" Alice began, and got no further.

"Carlisle!" came Emmett's voice from the next room. He burst through the opposite doorway, towing Rosalie by the wrist. She was pulling at his hand, trying to free herself. "Carlisle," Emmett cried, panic in his voice, "you have to make Rosie hunt!"

Everyone froze, staring at them. Rosalie finally dragged her hand away from Emmett's grasp and stood breathing hard, the challenge plain on her face.

"Oh, Rose, no!" said Alice, breaking the silence. Rosalie glared at her with obsidian eyes.

Carlisle stood. "Rosalie," he said gravely, "is this true? Have you stopped feeding?"

Rosalie's lovely forehead wrinkled. "If Edward can turn himself human, then so can I," she snarled.

"No, no, you can't," cried Emmett before anyone else could speak. "I won't allow it! Carlisle, tell her!"

Carlisle and Rosalie stared at each other. She was nearly as tall as he was, and both were fair as cornsilk, but his face was calm and somber while hers was increasingly desperate. At last she broke. "It's true," she said. "Carlisle, this is no life! I don't want you to think I'm not grateful to you and Esme for everything you have done for me. But I never should have been made this way. I don't belong here. And here is a chance for me to reclaim the life – the human life – that was taken from me." Her voice trembled, but she spoke fearlessly, black eyes flashing. "This is my decision, and no one will tell me otherwise."

Her words hung in the air. Bella looked at Emmett, whose anguish was written plain on his face. Edward had his head in his hands.

"Rose," said Alice softly, "we don't even know if it's going to work on Edward."

"That's true," said Carlisle.

"But it is working," said Rosalie, gesturing to Edward. "Look at him. He's getting weaker. He's _changing._ I can feel it." Edward looked up at her warily, but said nothing.

"We don't know that!" burst out Emmett, as if Edward couldn't hear. "For all we know, he's _dying_, Rosie! How could you do that to yourself?" His voice broke. "How could you do that to me?"

Bella found that she couldn't breathe.

Emmett dropped to his knees, his massive frame humbled before Rosalie's straight slim figure. "Rosie, _please,_" he breathed. "I couldn't change with you. I love this life. And I can't lose you. I can't."

His arms went around her hips and he buried his face against her stomach. She raised one hand as if to stroke his head, but it hovered butterfly-light above his temple and she stopped short of pushing her fingers into his hair. Bella felt her face go hot and cold, feeling as embarrassed and unwelcome as if she were trespassing on their most intimate moment.

"I love you, Emmett," said Rosalie softly. "But I want my life."

The room was silent for a long moment. Then Carlisle spoke, his voice somber. "Rosalie, it gives me nothing but grief to know that you are unhappy. I know you never took to this life the way some of us did. But this is unwise."

"Edward is doing it." Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

"You must see how his case is different," he said gently. "He is transforming because he cannot otherwise be with Bella. You already have a family – you have Emmett to consider."

"I don't see how it is so different," she said.

"And Emmett is correct – we don't know yet whether the transformation will work for Edward," Carlisle continued. "We may yet have to abandon this attempt. He has known the risks to his life from the beginning."

"Edward can make choices about his life, and I can't?" Rosalie burst out, looking mutinous. "Edward gets to decide what's best for himself, and I don't? You have some old-fashioned ideas, Carlisle. This isn't the Victorian age anymore."

"Rose…" said Alice softly, despairing.

Carlisle looked down sadly. "You're right, Rosalie." He paused and sighed softly. "Can I ask you at least for a compromise? Wait. Put this on hold. Return to hunting normally, and we will wait to see what happens with Edward. If he is successful, then – and only then – we will revisit your decision."

Rosalie looked at him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "A compromise."

Emmett sat back on his heels. "No!" he said in a strangled voice.

Rosalie continued as if he hadn't spoken. "I'm not going to forget, Carlisle. I'm not going to change my mind. I'm holding you to your word."

Carlisle nodded once.

Without a word, Emmett got to his feet and moved silently out of the room. The house seemed to echo soundlessly with his footsteps. The room was unnaturally still.

"Now go and see to him," said Carlisle with a note of command in his voice. Rosalie acquiesced, leaving as silently as Emmett had. Bella felt herself sway in the wake of her going, and put out her hand to steady herself on the back of a chair. Instead she found Edward's hand in hers, but he wouldn't look up to meet her face.


	11. Chapter 11

**Hello! Finally! I've had this new chapter ready for more than a week but the stupid uploader thingy wouldn't let me get through. But here you go! Sorry about the slowness, as always, but if you won't give up on me, I won't give up on you! I'm definitely in this for the long haul. If you like my little story, review it; if you really like it, tell someone about it. Thank you endlessly for reading.**

**I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden with mllebojangles!**

**Everything belongs to SMeyer.  
**

* * *

11

Bella was late getting home that evening, and it was almost full dark by the time Alice dropped her off. Once inside, she dropped her bag in the dim hallway and slumped against the door. She felt tapped out, bone-tired. She kept seeing Emmett kneeling before Rosalie, her hand almost touching him, not quite.

She sighed and headed for the stairs. A shower would make her feel better, then she might have the wherewithal to deal with her homework; after the scene with Rosalie, she hadn't been able to concentrate on anything much. As she climbed the first few stairs, there was noise from the kitchen, and Charlie's voice came out to her: "Bells? Is that you?"

"Yeah, I'm home," she answered. "I'm going up to –" she began, but he was coming down the hallway to meet her, his napkin still in his hand.

"You're pretty late getting in," he said. "You were at the Cullens'?"

_Oh, not now_, Bella thought, but she said, "Yeah, we, uh, lost track of time."

Charlie looked her over, his brow furrowed.

"Sorry," she added lamely.

"Huh," he said noncommittally. "Have you eaten anything? I started without you. It's just frozen pizza, but it's hot out of the oven."

Bella hesitated. She _had_ forgotten about dinner, and pizza sounded good, frozen or not. But at the moment she didn't relish the thought of sitting down for a convivial meal with Charlie. "Um…" she said. "No, but… I'd really just rather –"

"Bella," he interrupted her, sounding exasperated. "Come have dinner." Bella blinked at this uncharacteristic show of paternal authority, but he was already heading back to the kitchen, and she followed.

She helped herself to a slice of pizza, then turned to go to the table, and froze. There scattered across the tabletop were months' worth of college brochures, mostly unopened, which she had shoved in a drawer. Charlie was watching her carefully, and she doggedly cleared off her space and sat down to eat. Giving a little huff of a sigh, he sat down opposite her.

"Look what I found when I went looking for the masking tape," he said. "There's a whole drawer full of these. I hadn't realized you'd gotten so many." Bella said nothing, eating her pizza. "So, Bells, what _is_ your plan for next year? Have you thought about any of these places?"

Bella swallowed hard. "Um… sort of. I don't know."

"Well, have you applied for any of them?"

"I've… uh… I've kind of been thinking that I'd like to take some time off. You know. Get a job and save up some money."

She looked up at him and saw his disapproving frown. "Honey, you know you don't have to worry about the cost. Your mom and I have talked about it. We each have some money saved up, and we can help you with loans for whatever we can't cover." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, feeling trapped. "Why do you want time off? You're always doing so well in school. Aren't you looking forward to getting out of here? Getting to college?"

She halfheartedly tried to make light of it. "What, are you trying to get rid of me?" But when she looked up, his expression was serious, and she felt her own face fall. She scowled down at her plate.

"Have you applied anywhere at all?"

She threw her half-eaten pizza down on her plate. A panic she couldn't explain was rising in her. "Dad, I don't want to talk about this right now. Can we please just leave it?"

"Jesus, Bella, it's May of your senior year! If you're not going to think about college now, when do you plan to get around to it, huh?" She felt tears brewing in the back of her throat and she stared stonily down at the table, trying to will them away.

Charlie tried a different tack, speaking more gently. "Sweetheart, I think you should reconsider. Look, I've checked out some of these brochures – a bunch of these places have rolling admissions which means you haven't missed the deadlines yet, and you can still schedule interviews . And if you want to transfer to a different school after a year, that's ok too. See, this one looks great… look at these pictures –"

She abruptly shoved her chair back and launched herself away from the table. The tightness in her chest was getting unbearable. "Dad, I can't deal with this right now!"

"Hey! Bella! What's going on with you!"

"I… I just… can't…" She struggled to keep her voice under control and failed. She hunched over the sink miserably.

"This is about the Cullen kid, isn't it?" he said heavily. "Honey, I know he's important to you, but this is your future we're talking about."

The silence after his words was deafening. Bella fought to get a grip on her rising panic. _What's wrong with me?_ she thought despairingly.

"Can we at least talk about –" Charlie began. Bella whirled around and interrupted him.

"It's Edward," she said, as the tears began to roll down her face. "He's sick. He's really sick and he might die." Her voice was trembling uncontrollably, but she let it go, let the tears fall. A cold, distant part of her watched as the realization dawned on Charlie's face, and she let herself cry harder. "I'm so w-w-worried about him and I c-c-can't _do_ anything ab-bout it," she sobbed. "I can't s-s-sleep, I can't think ab-bout _anything…_"

Charlie, looking horrified, had gotten up and put his arms around her; she abandoned herself and cried against his chest. He made shushing noises and hesitantly stroked her hair. That distant part of her felt a twinge of guilt for manipulating him so handily, but mostly she was relieved – relieved that now he knew, and relieved that there was no more talk of college, no more talk of the future, no more questions for which she had no answers.

When she had calmed down a bit, he helped her into her chair and sat down opposite her. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

She took a hiccoughing breath and said shakily, "He's been out of school for weeks now. They don't really know what's wrong with him. They think he got bitten by something when he was traveling, and it's doing all kinds of crazy things to – to his nervous system, I think."

Charlie rubbed at his moustache worriedly. "I guess this is why you've been over there so much lately. Jesus Christ, Bella, why didn't you say something sooner? Doesn't his dad know how to help him?" She shook her head mutely. "Well, it's not… it's not contagious, is it?" She shook her head again, fighting to keep from crumpling into tears again.

The concern was plain on his face, and Bella asked hesitantly, "I… I can keep going to see him, right?" Her lip quivered.

He answered hurriedly. "Oh, of course, sweetheart. You'll let me know how he's doing?" _I'm so manipulative,_ she thought in disgust, but the relief washed over her as she nodded. "And, Bells, next time don't wait so long to tell me if there's something going on, ok?"

"Ok," she said, and just to put icing on the cake, she added meekly, "I'm sorry, Dad."

"Don't be sorry, honey," he said gruffly, looking uncomfortable.

In her room later, she brushed her hair before bed, watching her reflection in the mirror as if it belonged to someone else. The face was pale and composed; the eyes were flat and emotionless. _What on earth was that about? _she wondered. _Why should his questions about the future have upset me so much?_

Because she didn't know if she had a future, she realized. Because this unrelenting uncertainty was worse than any bad news could be. She had no clue what a future with Edward might look like, and the idea of a future without him was unthinkable. She was pinned between impossibilities, and could see no way out, especially not in Charlie's prosaic ideas of what she should be doing with her life. _Later_, she thought, setting down the brush. _I'll think about it later._ And if later never came, then she'd never have to think about it.

* * *

Each day at school felt as long as a week, but graduation came steadily closer. Bella floated through her days with a sense of unreality. She was detaching herself, distancing herself from the rest of her world, almost as thoroughly as Edward had; only the hours spent by his side felt at all real.

The conversations of her friends grated on her ears more and more. Their concerns seemed impossibly faraway and trivial, as if they were characters on a show that she only halfheartedly followed. The pity in Angela's eyes was too much to bear, so she stopped looking at Angela altogether.

One day as she and Alice approached the cafeteria, she stopped abruptly just outside the door, and couldn't make her feet take another step. The image of the table full of her friends – their bright open faces, their loud voices and their laughter – was suddenly too much for her to bear.

Alice was looking at her strangely. Bella asked desperately, "Do you mind if we sit alone today?"

"Of course not," said Alice simply, concern plain on her face. They filled their trays – or, rather, Bella filled her tray and Alice followed her, no longer needing to pretend – and slunk off to the Cullens' old table at the side of the cafeteria. She didn't look in the direction of Angela's table. Voices washed around them in a noisy blur, but around her and Alice was a little zone of blessed silence. Bella breathed deeply in utter relief.

After that day, by tacit agreement, she and Alice always sat alone. The quizzical looks – or, in some cases, glares – from the other kids couldn't touch her. She let the walls grow up higher and higher around her.

* * *

Edward was restless. He sprawled awkwardly in his chair, looking utterly out of place, as if his limbs were all the wrong shape for the furniture, or as if the room had been built for a different species entirely. Bella, studying for her history final, found herself watching him uneasily. His eyes were usually on her.

Jasper was sitting with them that day, and he also seemed incapable of focusing on the laptop that was open in front of him. His eyes flicked back and forth between Edward and Bella.

Edward abruptly slammed his book shut with enough force to send it spinning across the table. Bella jumped. He propped his elbows on the table and seized two fistfuls of his hair, as if he were holding his head in place.

"How's it going over there, Edward?" Jasper asked, his voice steady and calm.

"I'm sick of reading," growled Edward. "I don't see the point."

Bella said, "You know that we're trying to help Carlisle, so that he can help you when the time comes."

Edward scoffed. "Carlisle. He's too hesitant. He just wants to wait. We need to do something _now._"

"Well, what do you propose?" asked Jasper smoothly over Edward's impatience. The question only seemed to antagonize Edward further, and he snarled in Jasper's direction. Very slowly, Jasper closed his laptop.

"I know how you feel," said Bella softly. He went still at the sound of her voice. "The waiting is getting to all of us. But you know that we're all here with you – I'm here with you…" Her voice trailed away. It wasn't working, so instead she reached for his shoulder, wanting to soothe him.

A massive shudder wracked his frame at her touch. "Bella…" he breathed, then inhaled convulsively. He turned toward her, and his face was beyond inhuman; alien, incomprehensibly _other_. Her stomach plunged, cold and sick with horror as if she had seen a gruesome deformity in his face, but then he said again, "Bella," and his voice was rich with resonances that rang along her bones, freezing her in her chair. It was an instantaneous betrayal by her entire body; it was as if he had never before turned the full force of his seduction on her, as if every pull she had ever felt toward him had only been a fraction of what he was capable of. She was immobilized, torn between revulsion and attraction, desperate to hear him speak again, horrified that he might speak again, for surely she couldn't withstand another word.

"Bella, I think perhaps you should leave," came Jasper's voice, cutting through the hypnosis. She shivered all over, and felt herself break free. The great irresistible spotlight of Edward's attention had switched off and she felt hollow, emptied.

Edward swung his head slowly around to look at Jasper. Jasper was standing now, leaning across the table toward Edward, staring him down with all his might. For a moment Edward swayed, his eyes unfocused, but then all at once he snapped upright. Jasper reeled backward as if he had been struck across the face, and Edward stood up, his long frame unfolding forever until it seemed that his head brushed the ceiling. His face darkened into fury, a towering black rage.

"Don't you _dare_ try to control me!" he roared. "She's _MINE!_"

He whipped around to face Bella, teeth bared, and he sprang at her with a snarl, seizing her, nearly snapping her neck as he pulled her in.

Bella screamed.

Faster than lightning, faster than thought, Jasper was there, ripping her out of Edward's grasp. She felt Edward's fingers bruising her arms deeply as Jasper tore her away, and then he had whirled her around, putting himself between her and Edward, trapping her against a wall and making a cage for her body out of his limbs.

"Emmett!" he bellowed. "Carlisle! Someone help me!" The force of his cry rattled Bella's bones, and she cringed, pressed between his body and the wall. Under his arm she could see Edward wild-eyed with animalistic fury, screaming unintelligibly as he tore at Jasper to try to get to her. Jasper held, solid as stone, one forearm curled protectively around her head.

Emmett arrived, nearly taking the door off its hinges. He thundered, "Edward!" and tackled him to the ground. Bella dimly heard the shrieks and crashes of wrecked furniture, then Carlisle and Esme were there, and they joined Emmett, who was having difficulty pinning Edward down. Edward continued to scream, his voice rising.

"Get Bella out of here, Jasper," Carlisle shouted.

Jasper stepped back from the wall and Bella nearly fell against him, reaching out blindly to catch herself with her hands. He held her up with an arm around her shoulders and steered her quickly from the room. She couldn't breathe. Something was wrong with her legs; she had only gone a few steps down the hall when she almost fell again. Without breaking stride, Jasper bent and swept her up into his arms. As he strode away the screams continued to rise, sounding like nothing that could possibly come from a human throat, metal grating on metal. Edward never seemed to draw breath. Bella grabbed a fistful of Jasper's shirt.

Alice and Rosalie were on the stairway as Jasper passed through the living room. "Help them," he said curtly, jerking his head back toward the source of the noise in answer to the question in Alice's wide eyes. Bella squeezed her own eyes shut tight.

Jasper turned, pushed open a door with his knee. Fresh air. They were outside. He moved to put her down, but she cried out and clung to him. He swore under his breath, then sat smoothly on the top step of the porch. She was shaking, long deep shivers that seemed to rise from the bottom of her gut.

"It's ok, Bella," said Jasper softly. "You're safe. Nothing's going to hurt you."

Edward's screams cut off abruptly with a high wail, and the sudden silence was almost worse than the sound had been. Bella buried her face in Jasper's chest, which was very still. She held on to her handful of his shirt as if it were her lifeline.

Then the screaming began again, but it was different this time. There were words, or, rather, just one word:

"BELLLLAAAAA! _BELLLLLAAAAAAA!"_

Jasper's arms tightened around her. The first sobs shook loose from her body, ugly sobs, convulsive and inexorable, wracking her entire body.

The front door opened. Quiet footsteps, and Alice's voice.

"Is she ok?"

"You can see for yourself."

"I mean, did he hurt her?"

"I don't think so. I don't think she's bleeding. I may have hurt her myself – I had to slam her against the wall pretty fast."

A sigh. "Carlisle says we have to get her away from here if we want any chance of getting him under control."

"You should take her home. I'm sure they could use an extra set of hands in there. Here, take her –"

He moved to transfer Bella to Alice, but Bella shrieked "No!" through her sobs and clung to him harder.

"Can't you help her? Calm her down?"

"Believe me, I'm trying." His voice was grim.

There was a pause, then Alice: "Maybe you should take her."

"Give me your keys."

The door opened and closed again. A jingle of car keys, and Jasper stood again, shifting her slightly in his arms. A car door; he bent and lowered her carefully into the passenger seat.

"Bella, you have to let me drive," he said gently, unhooking her arm from around his neck, loosening her fist where she had made a wrinkled mess of the front of his shirt. She curled into a ball in the passenger seat. He closed her door; his door opened and closed.

The car purred to life and accelerated down the driveway. Bella felt as if there were an elastic cord tied from her heart to the house vanishing behind her in the trees, tightening painfully the farther away they went.

Jasper was silent. She opened her eyes and saw that they were approaching her street. "No! Jasper," she cried out. He looked over at her with worried eyes. "I don't want to go home yet. Can we please just drive? Please?"

He drove out of town, the tires whispering over the wet road as the car wound its way through the endless forest of green mossy columns and green dripping canopies. Her sobs had subsided to the occasional ragged breath. She wiped her face with her sleeve; her upper arms hurt terribly, and the back of her head. Jasper glanced over at her occasionally; she stared ahead through the windshield.

The road he had chosen brought them out to the coast and curved along the cliffs above the water. The sky and the water were both gray, and the monotony soothed her. Jasper was content to drive in silence, and so they drove.

After half an hour of drifting in a gray fog, Bella lifted her head. They were approaching a headland and the road curved out to stay along the coast. "Jasper," she said, her voice creaky from tears and disuse, "can we stop here?"

"Of course," he said automatically, and pulled off to the side of the road.

She got out of the car. A breath of wind from the ocean ruffled her hair, briny with salt and earthy with the scent of wet rock and sand. She breathed deeply and went to sit on a rock, facing out toward the water. After a moment, Jasper came and sat beside her.

"He would have killed me," she said. The calmness of her voice surprised her.

"I've been worried that something like this would happen," he said.

She rubbed absently at a sore spot on the back of her arm. "You stopped him."

He glanced at her, then looked back out at the ocean.

She followed the direction of his gaze. Everything was gray: soft gray clouds, steel-gray ocean, gray waves breaking on charcoal-gray rocks. Nothing was vivid or sharp-edged; everything was as blurred as she felt. She blinked slowly, feeling nothing.

"Jasper," she said with an effort, "are you controlling my mood?"

His smile was wry and sad. "I figured it was the least I could do."

"Can you let me feel my feelings now?"

He said, "Are you sure?"

She nodded.

The fog lifted, not all at once but gradually, a shade at a time, as if he were testing her balance and allowing her to adjust to the strain before giving her more. He watched her carefully. At the last, there it all was: Edward in his madness, attacking her in hunger, teeth bared in his alien face. Anger, hurt, sorrow, betrayal, fear: it all came back.

She took a shuddering breath and let it out.

"You're ok?"

She pushed her hair back from her face. "I think so. I mean, I will be." He was still watching her closely, his brows drawn together. Her voice quavered dangerously. "But I don't know if Edward will be."

His face was difficult to read. "If anyone can get him through this transformation in one piece, it's Carlisle," he said. "We've known since the beginning that there was going to be a horrible time. I wish you hadn't been caught in the middle of it."

_I'm always in the middle of it,_ Bella thought, and wrapped her arms around herself against the breeze. The movement hurt her. "Ow," she said.

"Are you hurt?" he asked immediately.

"Only a little – my arms." She finally acknowledged the slow ache that had been building in her head, radiating from the back of her skull. "And my head." She pushed up her sleeves as far as they would go, and they both looked for a moment at the deep purple bruises darkening her skin, bruises in the shapes of two gripping hands. "Well," she said ruefully, "I guess I'll be wearing long sleeves for a week or two." She rubbed at the back of her head.

"May I?" he asked. She tilted her head forward and he examined the back of her head with careful fingers. He hissed in sympathy. "You're going to have a bit of a goose-egg there. That was my doing – I do apologize."

"It's all right," Bella said, rubbing at the bump. She had a sudden vivid memory of Jasper slamming her into the wall, and she winced.

"I'm sorry," said Jasper.

"Oh, don't be sorry – I know you were protecting me –"

"No, I'm sorry about everything," he said. "I'm sorry for all the harm that we've done to you. I'm sorry your life has been turned upside-down. I'm sorry beyond words for any… distress… I've ever caused you." She looked down and kept silent. "Sometimes it seems that my family has done nothing but evil to you."

"Carlisle said something like that to me once. It's true that my life will never be completely normal ever again. But I don't mind," she said fiercely. "It was my choice. Never to have met Edward… I would never give him up, not for anything. If a normal life is a life without him, then I don't want it."

There was a sad half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Edward is lucky to have you," he said. "He loves you more than his own life. You know that, don't you? Regardless of what happened today?"

What happened today. She remembered Edward's face, his animalistic fury. The bruises on her arms throbbed. Her throat abruptly too tight for speech, she nodded.

Jasper was silent for a moment, looking out at the water with his tawny eyes. She wondered suddenly what color his eyes had been in his human life – stormy gray like the ocean below them, or blue as the sky hidden somewhere above the clouds? She almost had the courage to ask him, almost, but not quite.

"You're probably not going to be able to see him for a while," he continued after a moment. "I'm sure you know that, but I just want you to be ready. In truth, I'm surprised –" He bit back the rest of his sentence unsaid.

"What?" she asked. When he didn't answer, she urged, "Surprised at what?"

He sighed. "I'm surprised that Carlisle let him keep seeing you as long as he did. Then again, he and Edward both have always had an overinflated sense of Edward's strength." His voice was grim. "Perhaps they've both forgotten some truths about strength and weakness."

Bella felt bleak, looking out over the water. In retrospect, it did seem foolhardy of Carlisle to allow their continued visits despite Edward's deteriorating condition. Somehow it had never occurred to her that Carlisle might be _wrong_ about something. It wasn't a comforting thought.

And what if he was wrong about other things? What if he was wrong about the viability of the blood transfusion? What if he was wrong about their chances of success? What if Emmett had been right all along, and this was really just a suicide mission, and she had been watching Edward dying right before her eyes and hadn't stopped him or saved him?

_And what if today were the last time I ever saw him?_

She could suddenly see him before her again, crazed and wild. _She's mine,_ he had roared, and then he had taken her, like a possession, like a commodity. To be consumed and used up and thrown away. No gentle words or reassurance could stand in the face of that stark reality: he was bigger and stronger, and in that moment she had been a rag doll in his hands and unable to protect her body and the self that it housed. The bruises on her arms throbbed. He wasn't himself, she knew; he wasn't in his right mind. But there was something in him that could do this, and she couldn't stop him.

A heavy tear fell from each of her eyes and splashed on her hands. Jasper, no doubt sensing her mood, watched her with a deepening frown of dismay and contrition. She scrubbed wearily at her face with her hands. She was so tired of crying.

"I'm ready…" she said shakily. "I'm ready not to be feeling anything now. Please."

Out of sorrow for her grief and his own part in it, he gave her the kindest thing he could: tranquility and calm, a golden haze of serenity, the silence of sunlight and the dusty whisper of wheatfields. Defying the gray all around them, he conjured for her the languid Southern summers of his childhood, the deep honeyed stillness of a countryside unmarred by jet engines and combine tractors. He gave the peace he had known as a boy and which still, despite everything in his past, lay at his very bones. She sighed as it washed over her and leaned against him, exhausted.

Her head was heavy on his shoulder. Slowly, cautiously, he inhaled her scent: her hair, her tears, her fear, her love, the blood rushing just under her skin. He put his arm carefully around her shoulders, supporting her. She closed her eyes.


	12. Chapter 12

**Hello, the fandom! You are all wonderful beyond measure for reading my little story. I can assure you that, no matter how slow my updates are, I'm not abandoning Clear Light - I WILL see this through to the end! Of course, reviews = encouragement = motivation, so if you want to help me write faster, leave me some love! =)**

**One thing - you might want to check to see if you've read Chapter 11. Ffn . net was being wonky when I uploaded the last chapter, and I'm not sure if update alerts ever went out. End public service announcement.**

**SMeyer owns everything. Mllebojangles, bein' in love wit yo' ass ain't cheap. =) You're the best!  
**

* * *

12

"_…So as you can see, there's been very little change._" Carlisle's voice was weary. "_He has moments of lucidity, but much of the time he is in a rage and we cannot reason with him. He has to be supervised around the clock, and often requires physical restraining."_

Physical restraining. Bella leaned against the window frame, cellphone held to her ear, and watched the raindrops rolling down the outside of the glass. She tried not to think about the technical details of physically restraining any vampire, let alone her Edward.

_"Bella? Are you there?"_

"Yes, I'm still here," she said, rousing herself. "I'm sorry. Go on."

_"I have reason to believe that the rate of his transformation is increasing as the venom grows weaker in his body, but it is not yet so weak that it has ceased to fight." _There was a pause on the other end of the line. _"When he is… more himself… he asks for you."_

Bella bit her lip.

_"You understand that we cannot let you see him at this point, don't you?"_

"Yeah. I do."

_ "He was very relieved to know that you took no lasting harm last week. He has expressed his remorse to me many times."_

_Only when he's in his right mind, though,_ Bella thought, but didn't say.

_"This is very difficult for all of us, Bella,"_ said Carlisle. _"Not a single one of us enjoys seeing him suffer so much. But when he's lucid, he tells us again and again that he doesn't want to stop now; he wants to continue with the change. We would end the transformation in an instant if he asked us, but he hasn't asked."_

"I know," said Bella. "I only wish –"

There was a crash on Carlisle's end of the line, and the sound of shouting in the background. _"I'm sorry, Bella,"_ said Carlisle, sounding harried, _"but I must go."_ Abruptly the phone beeped in her ear; he had hung up.

She let the phone drop from her ear and pressed her forehead to the windowpane. "I only wish I could see him," she said, "and know that he's all right for a little while longer."

She sighed and turned back to the room. Alice lay across Bella's bed on her stomach, propped on her elbows, feet in the air. She looked up at Bella inscrutably. Bella sank to the floor in the one small clear space in a sea of books and papers. They had been ostensibly studying physics when Carlisle had called; or, rather, Bella had been studying while Alice flipped desultorily through a fashion magazine.

"Come on," said Bella. "The final's tomorrow. Quiz me on torque one more time – I think I'm finally starting to get it. Would've been nice if Mr. Williams hadn't waited until the last few weeks to teach it to us."

There was silence from the bed. Bella looked up. Alice was still looking at her strangely.

"No you don't," Alice said softly.

"What?"

"You don't want to see him," Alice replied, just as softly. "You don't want to be at our house, you don't want to be around us, and you certainly don't want to see him."

Bella looked more closely at Alice, and it was as if she hadn't been seeing clearly before. She noticed the worry in the set of her mouth, the misery in every line of her face. Her eyes looked shadowed and somehow smudged. If Bella hadn't known better, she would have said that Alice looked exhausted. She suddenly felt cold and wrapped her arms around herself. "What do you mean?" she whispered.

"Everything is awful," Alice said. She finally dropped her eyes, staring unseeing through the pages of her magazine. "He's suffering so badly, and not only do we just have to watch, we have to prolong his suffering."

Bella swallowed hard.

"We don't do anything else," continued Alice. "Carlisle goes to the hospital, and I go to school, but otherwise all we do is watch Edward. When he gets violent, sometimes it takes four of us to hold him down. Emmett is so angry, he just curses a blue streak at Edward the entire time. And it's completely destroying Esme – sometimes after he gets like that she won't talk at all for a while."

"Alice," said Bella querulously, her stomach dropping.

"And even when he's quiet, all Emmett and Rosalie do is fight," Alice plunged on. "Rose is hunting for now, but they argue constantly. He says, how can you want to do this to yourself, and she says, I'll never give up wanting to be human again, and round and round they go. And meanwhile Jasper is absorbing all this horribleness from everyone and he's retreating so far into himself that sometimes I can't find him at all."

"Carlisle said that Edward has times when he's lucid," whispered Bella miserably.

"He said that, did he? Well, he does, but only for a few minutes at a time, maybe twice a day. Mostly he just screams. For hours. He's like an animal. Or a monster."

"Alice!" Bella cried, clapping her hands over her ears.

In a moment Alice was beside her on the floor, heedless of the papers under her. Her arms went around Bella. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she whispered in her ear as Bella cried. "Bella, I'm so sorry. I know why he's doing it. I'm not mad at him, or you. It's going to be ok. It just hurts for all of us. I'm sorry."

Later, after she calmed down and Alice left to go home, Bella got ready for bed. Charlie was away on duty, so Bella crawled under her covers, buried her face in the pillows, and screamed, screamed like Edward, screamed until her throat was raw and she thought her lungs would crack. She wanted to feel like him, to take some of the pain on herself; she imagined drawing some of his anguish away, as if there were a limit on the agony he could feel, as if his suffering weren't infinitely deep.

* * *

She slept alone; she woke alone. She felt rather than saw Charlie watching her at every moment for signs of distress until she thought she might snap from claustrophobia, but he brought up no unpleasant topics, and she volunteered no information. She went to school, where she spoke to Alice, or no one. She took her finals and did well on them. She watched her classmates' eagerness and excitement grow as graduation approached; she herself felt nothing. She signed a few yearbooks when asked, but only with her name. She didn't bother to ask anyone to sign hers.

On a chilly damp Friday evening, Bella and Alice graduated from high school. Renee and Phil had flown in for the occasion, and they sat in the bleachers of the high school gymnasium with Charlie. Bella watched Alice walk across the stage, her slight form made no less graceful by the shapeless graduation robe. Alice's eyes sought out Esme in the crowd; she was the only family member who came to the ceremony. Everyone else would have to be at home on duty, Bella reasoned. After Alice went Sonia Cuthbert, and Bella frowned down at her folded hands. Edward's name should have been called next.

The rest of the names went by one by one, and then Bella was waiting to climb the steps to the stage. She looked for her family but lost them in the blur of faces. Her name was called, and she made the short walk without stumbling. She heard Renee and Phil cheering, loud and boisterous over the polite applause, and finally found them in the crowd. Charlie was silent, but clapped proudly, eyes bright.

At the reception in the cafeteria afterward – sheet cake, punch in plastic cups, napkins in school colors – Bella stood awkwardly between Charlie and Phil while Renee chattered excitedly and snapped pictures of them in various combinations. Esme and Alice came up to say hello and exchange congratulations. Renee seized excitedly on the chance to take pictures of Bella with a school friend, and Bella cringed, but Alice played along and smiled sweetly for the camera.

Charlie, meanwhile, made his way over to Esme, and Bella overheard him.

"Mrs. Cullen, I'm so sorry about your boy Edward," he said.

Esme turned half-startled to look at him, the golden eyes wary in her lovely, incongruously young face.

"Bella tells me that he's very sick," Charlie explained hastily, taken aback. "I know you're isolated out there in the woods. Just wanted you to know that we're all thinking about him, and if there's anything we can do…"

His words faded away into an embarrassed silence, but Esme's severe look had softened, and she laid a hand on his arm.

"Thank you very much, Mr. Swan," she said. "He's very well looked-after. My husband is hopeful about his prospects."

Charlie looked up at this, and his eyes snapped to Bella. Bella looked away quickly as if she hadn't been listening in.

Renee checked her watch. "Ok, baby, we'd better get going if we're going to make our reservation," she said brightly.

"Reservation?" asked Bella warily.

"We're taking you out for dinner in Port Angeles!" Renee said. "There's the cutest little Italian place there. You'll just love it."

"Yeah, I… I've been there," said Bella. "Look, you don't have to make a big deal –"

"Big deal?" cried Renee. "How often does my only child graduate from high school? I think we should be making a bigger deal! Your dad only just managed to talk me out of throwing a party for you."

A party? Bella threw a look at Charlie, mixed of equal parts dismay and gratitude. He gave her a half-smile and a shrug. For once, Bella and her father were in perfect understanding.

"Would you and Alice like to come along, Esme? I'm sure it won't be hard to add two more to our reservation…" began Renee.

"Thank you; you're very kind," said Esme. "But I'm afraid we must be getting home." She gave Bella an enveloping hug. "You'll hear from us soon," she said meaningfully before releasing her.

Bella nodded, and waved at Alice as the two disappeared into the jubilant crowd. Suddenly there was too much noise and too much color; she wanted to be gone, and her family was happy to oblige.

As they made their way toward the door, a hand caught Bella's arm. She turned to see Angela.

"I'll catch up with you outside," Bella told her mother, who went on ahead.

"Congratulations," said Angela with a shy smile. "Happy graduation, I guess."

"Yeah, you too," said Bella.

There was an awkward beat, and Angela toyed with her empty punch cup. "So, uh, good luck with everything."

"Thanks," said Bella, and added, feeling that she ought to make conversation, "Do you know what you're doing next year?"

"I got into Whitman," said Angela, a smile breaking out over her face. "I'll be starting in August."

"Wow, Ange, that's really great," said Bella sincerely. "I'm happy for you. I hope it's wonderful."

"Thanks," said Angela. "What about you? Do you know where you're going?"

Bella's face fell. "I'm… I'm going to be sticking around here for a little while. You know, get a job, maybe save some money…" Her words trailed off lamely.

"Well, I'm sure that'll… that'll be cool too," said Angela with false brightness in her voice. Bella could see her trying to be enthusiastic and trying to keep the condescension out of her voice, and wished she would just stop.

The silence was awkward, and Angela certainly felt it too. "Look, Bella, I'm sorry about the way everything got weird this year. I never meant for it to happen."

Bella looked up at her appraisingly. There was no hostility or resentfulness in Angela's voice or face. "I'm sorry too," said Bella honestly. "I wish… I wish a lot of things had been different."

Angela shuffled her feet. "I want you to know I don't hold any grudges or anything. I know you've been through a lot this year."

She paused, waiting, so Bella said, "Yeah. Thanks." There was so much more she wished she could say, and she couldn't find words for any of it. There was a feeling of finality about this conversation that she hated.

"I hope… I hope everything works out ok," said Angela, and Bella could hear the concern in her voice – concern for Edward, concern for Bella herself. Looking at Angela's open, guileless face, Bella suddenly found herself absurdly choked up. _I don't deserve her kindness,_ she thought miserably. _I've been the worst possible friend to her._

"Thanks, Angela," she managed to croak. She cleared her throat viciously and spoke with more force than she meant, in an attempt to keep her voice steady. "I'm sorry – I have to run and catch up with my parents. But good luck. You're going to have a wonderful time at college – I know it."

She would have turned and fled, but she found herself suddenly caught up into a hug. Then Angela was gone into the milling crowd. Stunned, Bella turned, and walked out the doors of her high school one last time.

* * *

Phil flew back to Jacksonville the next day, but Renee was scheduled to stay over the weekend. It would be her last chance at mother-daughter bonding for some time, she insisted, and she proceeded to distract Bella extremely efficiently by whisking her around to Port Angeles and Seattle and even down to Portland for shopping and eating and relaxing. Bella enjoyed the shopping and the restaurants, and they even found a sunny afternoon to spend on a beach, but she had difficulty with the relaxation part; she jumped whenever her phone buzzed, waiting desperately for the next text message from Alice about Edward's condition.

Renee entirely avoided the two topics Bella wished to avoid: boys, and college. For this Bella was grateful, and she tried to be her normal self with her mother, not falsely bright and bubbly but also not visibly mopey or depressed. She thought she was doing a pretty good job of it, until the night before Renee flew back to Florida.

Her mother had brought her home after an evening at the movies, and Bella had said goodnight and gone up to her room, expecting that Renee would go back to her hotel and they would drive her to the airport in the morning. But a few minutes later she heard soft voices from downstairs, and went to investigate.

Renee and Charlie were in the kitchen, speaking quietly. Bella crept down the hallway so that she could hear them better.

"…not a word for the past three days," Renee was saying. "I gave her every opportunity to talk about it. She used to tell me things like that. I mean, she's always been a quiet kid, but this is ridiculous."

There was a frustrated huff from Charlie. "And I can't bring up any topic she doesn't want to talk about, or she completely breaks down. You should have seen her when I asked about college. Utter panic."

"You think it's about this Edward?" Renee asked.

"It has to be," said Charlie. "Things have been strange ever since she met him."

"You know, kids fall in love all the time," said Renee. "When you're that age, it seems like the most important thing in the world."

"But not like this," said Charlie. "It's like her entire existence is wrapped up in him. It's not healthy, and it's not right. But now that he's sick, of course I can't say anything to her about it. It's like she's in a holding pattern."

There was a pause. Bella stayed back in the shadows, ready to edge away if it seemed that the conversation were over. But Charlie continued.

"You know, I hate to say it, but as much as I've loved having her here for these two years, I wonder if it wouldn't have been better if she'd never come. If she'd never gotten mixed up with this kid. It's been nothing but drama since she got here."

"She would probably reply with something about how it's better to have loved and lost, and all that," said Renee. Bella could hear the wry smile in her voice.

Charlie sighed again. "I hope it's that simple."

Renee said softly, "I'd say that she's doing ok for right now. She finished high school, which is more than a lot of kids manage. Give her time – she'll figure things out."

"But I want more than that for her," Charlie burst out. "She's smart. She can do anything she wants to do. I don't want to see her throwing away her chances for the future because she's blinded by this boy."

"And what? And gets married too early?" said Renee pointedly. "Like we did?" Charlie didn't answer. Renee continued. "She's always been wise beyond her years. I think it's only fair of us to allow her a little foolishness. And we'll see what happens with Edward. We just need to give her some space."

Charlie grumbled, but the issue seemed to be closed, and Renee began collecting her purse and coat to go. Bella snuck back upstairs through the darkness to her bed. She was perhaps more conflicted than she'd been before. Hearing her parents speak so reasonably of her problems, she could suddenly see everything from their perspective, and the double-vision was disorienting.

_It all hangs on Edward,_ she thought. _I can't do anything at all until I know what's going to happen with him._ Hope flared painful and bright in her, and simultaneously her stomach lurched with worry. _I can't live like this much longer. Something's got to give._

* * *

Renee left the next morning in a flurry of kisses and hugs and promises of future visits. The car ride to the airport was one last opportunity for unpleasant conversation, and Bella braced herself, but Renee and Charlie seemed to be sincere in their plan to give her space. Bella wasn't sure if she was relieved or perversely disappointed.

Over the next week she expected her life to come to some kind of routine, but it refused to settle. There was nothing organizing her time now that high school was over, and she found herself adrift, wandering uneasily from couch to computer to kitchen to outside and back. She read books, she watched television, she cooked and took walks and did the grocery shopping, but everything felt somehow temporary, somehow hollow.

One afternoon as she sat listlessly in front of a documentary about a rock band from Charlie's era, her phone rang. She grabbed it, expecting to see Alice's name on the screen, but it was Carlisle. She stabbed at the buttons.

"Hello?" she said breathlessly.

_"Bella?"_

"Yes, it's me."

_"Bella, Alice is on her way to get you at your house."_ There was barely-suppressed urgency in his voice. _"There's been a change. Edward is asking for you."_


	13. Chapter 13

**Hi everyone! Remember me? Probably not. =) It's my own fault - my life has been insane for months now. But I'm working, slowly and steadily, and I'm going to see this story through to the end, come hell or high water.**

**See the end of the chapter for a special note, meant specially for anyone nerdy enough to follow me down my crazy little nerdy garden path.**

**Everything belongs to SMeyer. Mllebojangles, when that day arrives, we'll live on Ocean Drive.**

* * *

13

Bella's feet felt as heavy as lead as she walked down the hallway of the Cullens' house. _The last time I came down this hallway, Jasper had to carry me,_ she thought distantly. Now she moved on her own power, but her footsteps were agonizingly slow and hesitant.

Minutes after Bella's short conversation with Carlisle, Alice had pulled up to the Swans' house in a screech of tires. As she drove at breakneck speed down the forest roads, she had clarified Carlisle's words: _a_ change, not _the_ change. Not yet. He was lethargic and barely responsive, Alice said. Also there were physical changes that she wouldn't describe. Bella had swallowed hard and gripped the armrests.

Alice opened the door at the end of the hallway, and Bella barely recognized the room inside. It had been transformed into a hospital room, with beeping monitors and charts and what seemed like miles of cords and tubing and wires. At the center of it was a hospital bed, which Carlisle was bending over, shining his tiny pen-light into the eyes of –

The eyes of the figure on the bed. Bella steeled herself, and looked.

It was Edward, and not-Edward, and the same, and changed. It wasn't that he looked smaller; in fact, the bed almost seemed too narrow for his broad shoulders, too short for his long limbs. It was his utter stillness that took the breath from her body. His large hands were loose and empty and open, hanging limply from the wrists where they were fastened to the bars on the bed with thick straps of leather – _don't look at the restraints, don't look at the restraints. _She looked instead for a rise and fall in his chest, before remembering numbly that he wouldn't be breathing.

He looked like he was dead.

She was dimly aware that the low conversations in the room died away as she crept closer to the bed. She finally made herself look at his face, and then her eyes were riveted and she didn't know how she had been able to look anywhere else. He was beautiful – he had always been beautiful – but it was a beauty that terrified, a marble bust of an angel as carved by a nightmare demon. Her senses of alien-ness and familiarity were again at war with each other.

With a sudden convulsive movement Edward inhaled, and Bella jumped as if someone had shouted in her ear. His eyes snapped open. "Bella," he whispered, and his body twisted as he lunged against the restraints.

In an instant there was someone in front of her; she reeled back, but it was only Jasper, interposing himself protectively between her and the bed. The thrashing on the bed had stopped, and she reached out and put Jasper gently aside, moving forward to Edward's side.

He was lying back, panting weakly. "Bella," he said in shallow breaths, "I'm… I'm sorry…"

"Edward," she whispered, and touched his face. The skin was cool and dry. He looked up into her eyes.

Her vision blurred and her heart seemed to be having trouble keeping up. She found herself pulling at the leather straps around his wrists. Blinded by tears, she was having trouble working the buckles.

There was a gentle hand on her shoulder. Carlisle. "Bella," he said softly.

"Get them off," she said huskily, unlatching the first one. Edward's hand dropped to the bed. He watched her warily.

"Bella, that may not be the best idea," said Carlisle.

"Look at him," she insisted, her voice cracking. "He won't. He can't. And you could stop him if he did."

Carlisle exchanged a look with Esme, who silently released the restraint on his other wrist.

"Edward," Bella whispered again, taking his hand, which hung heavy in her grip, unsupported. He seemed to have spent the last of his energy, and he lay quietly, eyes on her face, drinking in the sight of her. She found that all her words were gone.

His lips curved in the ghost of a smile. "You're beautiful," he whispered, his voice like dry leaves. She gave an incredulous half-laugh, imagining blotchy skin and a red nose, but her tear-bright eyes shone.

"You are too," she said unabashedly. "You always are."

He closed his eyes and exhaled a little puff, almost a grunt. "I must look like a monster."

She shook her head fiercely. "Not that. Never that."

His eyes stayed closed – he seemed to be gathering his strength – and she studied him. What about his face was different? Was it his nose, or the shape of his mouth? She couldn't decide. His lips were almost as colorless as his skin, and his hair looked dark against the stark white pillow, perhaps less metallically bright than usual. His hand was cold, but felt somehow pliable, less like yielding stone and more like clay. _More like human flesh,_ she thought unbidden, then shivered and forced her mind away.

He struggled to get his eyes open again. "Bella," he said, searching for her face, as if he were having difficulty focusing. She leaned in closer, perching on the edge of the bed.

"I'm here," she said.

His eyes found her face. "You graduated from high school," he whispered, and his face broke into a sweet, true smile that made her heart stutter in her chest. "Congratulations."

She sniffled inelegantly. "And you've already done that, what, a hundred times?"

He shook his head minutely back and forth on the pillow. "But you only get to do it once. And I'm happy for you." There was another long pause. His stillness was terrifying. "Bella?"

"I'm still here."

"I want…"

His voice was painfully soft. She leaned over him, curling her two hands around his, holding it to her heart. "What is it?"

"I want…" He licked his lips, but his voice was dry as dust, dry as bones. "I want you to go to college," he whispered.

That startled an incredulous half-laugh out of her, though the tears threatened to well up again. "This is hardly the time to be thinking about that, is it?"

"No, it's exactly the time," he insisted. "If this doesn't… If I don't wake up. You have to go to college. You have to go on with life."

"Don't say that," she said, low and urgent. "Of course we'll get you through this. We'll go to college together. Next year – we will."

"But if I don't…" By the barest fraction, his fingers tightened their grip.

"No, Edward! Don't say it." She struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the panic in her voice.

He subsided, breathing shallowly. There was such pain on his face that her heart twisted. She had hurt him, on top of everything else.

She took a slow breath and let it out. He had been so strong for so long, and now it was her turn to be strong for him. With that a window opened in her mind, just a little, enough to let some light into a dark corner. _What am I afraid of?_ she asked herself. _Is it the idea of a future without him beside me, or just the future itself?_ She suddenly saw herself as if from far away, stammering tongue-tied at the guidance counselor, sobbing frantically in the face of Charlie's questions._ I cannot be afraid of my life. I cannot._ She squared her shoulders and felt an old, old knot of tension loosen and lift away.

"I'm sorry, Edward," she said softly, and her voice was steady and calm. She lifted his hand and kissed the parchment-dry skin over his knuckles. "I will. I'll go to college and I'll grow up and have a wonderful life. _But you're going to be beside me." _His eyes drifted closed, and there was the faintest smile on his face. "And we're going to walk in the sunlight, and travel the world, and learn everything there is to know," she said, "and we'll do it together. We'll grow old together."

His body was relaxing, his hand drooping in hers. The tension went out of his face and his frame. He whispered something too low for her to hear, and she leaned forward.

"What is it, Edward?"

"I love you," he whispered.

Her heart was overflowing. "I love you," she repeated back to him.

He managed to raise his voice a trifle. "Carlisle?"

"Yes?" came Carlisle's voice from behind Bella's shoulder. She had forgotten he was there; she'd forgotten that anyone else existed.

"Is everyone here?" Edward asked, looking vaguely around. Bella had the unnerving sense that his eyes had difficulty focusing on anything more than a few inches away from his face.

Carlisle's voice was soothing and gentle; the consummate doctor's voice. "We're all here, son."

"Everyone?"

Unexpectedly, from the other side of the room, Emmett's rumble: "We're all here, Edward."

"Good," Edward murmured, subsiding. "I'd like to rest now." Esme was immediately busy rearranging pillows and coverlets. Bella reluctantly released his hand and laid it on his chest.

"Bella?" His eyes would only open halfway.

"I'm still here," she said.

"Don't leave me," he said, like a child.

She stroked his hair. "I'm not going anywhere," she said.

"Good," he repeated, eyes drifting.

He was going; she could feel it. He was sliding out on the tide and leaving her behind on the shore. Fear gripped her heart.

"Edward," she called, as if he were already far away, and despite her best efforts, her voice trembled. "You have to come back to me," she said, fighting hard. "You must come back."

"I always come back," he whispered. Then his eyes closed, and a breath puffed inaudibly out between his lips. He didn't inhale again.

* * *

She stayed by his side for hours, oblivious to the hushed whirr of activity around them. She sat perched on the edge of the bed until her legs grew numb from the precarious position, then she moved to the chair which someone had placed by the bed for her. Occasionally one of Edward's hands might twitch, or his head jerk infinitesimally to one side in response to a sound, but he didn't open his eyes again.

Esme brought her a sandwich as afternoon faded into evening. She took a few bites without tasting it, then realized abruptly that she had left home without telling Charlie where she was. She looked around to see Alice coming in, carrying Bella's overnight bag. "Don't worry," Alice said. "I brought you some things from home. Your dad knows you're here."

Bella thanked her automatically and settled uneasily back into her chair. She wondered if Alice had told Charlie that Edward's health had reached some kind of crisis, or if she'd fed him the usual story of a sleep-over. It didn't ultimately matter. Nothing really mattered, at the moment.

She set the plate with the half-eaten sandwich aside impatiently. She suddenly felt that if she didn't occupy her mind somehow, she would go crazy. She looked around and her eyes lit on a pile of books on a table at the side of the room, a relic of their days of reading and note-taking. Perhaps it was useless now, but it was something she could do, and she was desperate.

On top of the pile was a microbiology textbook. She had mostly been reading Carlisle's medical texts before, but the thought of reading yet more about blood was too agonizing at the moment, so she took the microbiology book.

At first she flipped through pages without absorbing any information, mind drifting, looking up whenever Edward made the slightest movement. But as she went along, she found herself reading more and more carefully. There was more information here than she'd gotten in her tepid, indifferently-taught biology class – _and besides,_ she thought, _I spent more of that class mooning over Edward than actually paying attention to the teacher._ She smiled at the bittersweet memory, and looked up. Edward lay perfectly still and silent.

She turned the page to a chapter with the heading "Microbial Parasites." _Yeecch,_ she thought, but read on, at first in horrified fascination, then in slightly less horrified interest, then genuine amazement. Parasites, it turned out, were incredible. She read about parasitic life forms whose entire life cycles were entwined with those of their host creatures. There were microbes that could alter the courses of life in order to find their preferred food source or necessary environment for reproduction. There were parasites that caused insects and birds and fish to act in ways completely counter to their own nature, and all in service of the parasite's needs.

Then she read about _Toxoplasma gondii._ It was a single-cell microbe, a protozoan, that could only reproduce in the intestines of cats, common housecats. It could then scatter itself through the cat's droppings – _ew,_ thought Bella, _but I guess that makes sense _– where it could be picked up by rodents. Then came the amazing part. Once the microbe was inside a rodent – say, a rat – it needed to find a way to get back to the only place where it could reproduce itself: a cat's gut. So somehow the microbe, the tiny single-celled organism, managed to completely alter the brain chemistry of the rat. It suppressed the rat's natural fear of the cat, and made it attracted to the cat's smell rather than afraid of it. It made it more likely that the rat would run out into an open space in daylight, rather than hiding safely away. Because of this tiny little parasite, the rat was much more likely to be caught and eaten by a cat, therefore sending the rat into the cat's digestive system, and putting _T. gondii _exactly where it wanted to be.

_Incredible,_ thought Bella, equal parts aghast and delighted. A tiny microorganism that could so completely change the workings of a brain? True, only a rat brain, but still a mammal, still a complex and highly evolved creature. And who knew what else was out there? What if similar things could happen in humans?

In humans.

Bella dropped the book into her lap and clapped her hands to either side of her head. A single idea had flashed through her brain like lightning, just as fast and just as destructive.

Vampire venom. What if it were a parasite? What if it weren't just some magical inexplicable substance, but actually a life form all on its own? What if it could so drastically alter the minds and bodies of its carriers that it turned them from humans to what they called vampires?

_Of course,_ thought Bella. It fed on human blood. So once it got into a human body, it slowly consumed all the blood there, taking the place of the blood in the veins and halting all the body's normal processes. Then once its initial food source was gone, it needed a way to keep feeding itself. So it made its human host into a perfect machine for acquiring more human blood – creating the necessary speed and strength, of course, but also the beauty, the otherworldly magnetic attraction by which a vampire could pull in its human prey. It also gave itself a means of reproduction in the process, for while most of the vampire's victims served only as a food source, a small percentage of them became new carriers for the parasite and became vampires themselves.

It would have to be an incredibly powerful parasite, Bella thought in wonder. It fundamentally changed the functions of the body, and completely re-animated the human host. Heart, skin, digestive organs, all transformed, re-purposed.

And what about the brain?

The blood drained from Bella's face.

The parasite certainly took over the human host's brain, changing its behavior, altering its sensory powers. Did this change in brain function go all the way through? Did the parasite suppress, re-purpose and transform the mind as well?

_Oh my God_, thought Bella. _ What if it's intelligent?_

What if the parasite took over the brain of the host, stealing the body for conveyance but halting and discarding the human mind that had inhabited it? Perhaps it kept the identity and memories (faint and fuzzy though they might be) of the human brain, but became its own entity?

_And what Edward is doing to himself – he's starving out the parasite,_ she thought suddenly. He was depriving it of its food source and choking the life out of it. When it was gone – when it died – they would attempt to restart the human body that had carried it for so long: heart, lungs, skin and stomach and muscles and all the rest of it. And the brain as well.

But when the brain awoke, with the parasite dead, would he still remember his life from his time as a carrier of the venom? Would those memories and experiences be written somewhere on his human brain, or would they be gone along with the parasite?

She looked up at Edward. He lay silent and still, eyes closed.

Who was waiting there behind the closed eyes, waiting to wake up? Was it her own beloved Edward, or was it a boy who had nearly died of influenza ninety years before?

The thought froze her in her chair, the book forgotten in her lap. She suddenly wished she could un-read the chapter about parasites, un-think her realization, as if not knowing the truth might make it less than true. The others had no idea. Should she tell them? Should she plant the possibility in their minds that they were being controlled by microscopic organisms and not their own free will at all? What a horrible thing, to doubt the integrity of your own mind.

As she stared unseeing at the still form on the bed, she realized suddenly that he hadn't moved in a long time. She couldn't remember the last time he had moved, in fact. She had lost track of time while she'd been reading, but it must have been at least an hour. Most unusually of all, there was no one else in the room with them, and hadn't been for a while.

Propelled by a sudden panic, she lunged forward out of her chair. The textbook dropped from her lap to the floor with a thump. She seized Edward's arm, shaking him.

"Edward? Edward?"

Nothing. He didn't stir, didn't breathe, gave no sign of life at all.

He was gone.

Bella pelted to the door and yanked it open. "Carlisle! _Carlisle!"_

* * *

The next few minutes were a confused flurry. Esme drew Bella gently away from Edward's bed, despite her protests. Carlisle bent silently over Edward, examining him, and after a few minutes announced that Bella's suspicions were correct: Edward had gone completely under. His words set off a cascade of activity, as though an electric current had run through the room. Everyone moved quietly and calmly, though Bella felt that she wanted to scream at them to save Edward from what they had let him do to himself.

Instead, she controlled herself, and at the first possible moment she asked Carlisle if she could speak to him in his office. Something in her face made him agree, and they slipped away from everyone. Standing nervously before Carlisle's desk and twisting her fingers together, she told him of what she'd read and her parasite hypothesis. It was farfetched, she knew, and she was no scientific expert. As she spoke she heard the ridiculousness of what she was saying, and fought to keep a note of defensiveness out of her voice. She ended almost apologetically.

Carlisle listened soberly, and when she finished, he stared for a few moments into the middle distance. "It's an interesting theory," he said at last, focusing again on her face. "I've never considered that the venom could be a kind of life form. But knowing what we do about its behavior and effects, I have to admit that it's possible."

Bella, shocked that he hadn't dismissed her idea out of hand, made no reply. Carlisle stood and went to the window. "I will have to think further on this," he said gravely. "This could completely change my understanding of vampire kind." He paused, looking out at the darkness. "And now you fear that Edward will be different when he wakes – that the venom leaving his body will take his memory and personality."

"Yes," said Bella anxiously.

The silence hung heavy in the room. At last Carlisle turned away from the dark window and looked at her. "I do not feel that my mind has been supplanted by another entity," he said. "I know only that I am myself, and can feel the continuity of that self stretching back through my whole lifetime. What precisely it is that thinks my thoughts, or says my words, I cannot say, any more than you or anyone could. But I do not think that you should worry about Edward. He is strong. He will come back to us, if he possibly can."

Bella nodded slowly. She felt comforted by the quiet confidence of his words, the self-assuredness that helped make him such a good doctor. She also heard the gentle dismissal in his voice, and turned to go.

"Bella?" he added as she neared the door. She turned around. He smiled at her. "It was cleverly thought. More than clever – it was a brilliant leap of logic. You showed the combination of intuition and imagination when faced with seemingly disparate facts that characterizes the best scientific minds. Very cleverly done."

Blushing furiously at his praise, Bella nodded again, and slipped out the door.

When the girl had left, Carlisle turned back to the window, the smile fading from his face. Someone watching him might have seen him examine his reflection in the dark glass, staring deeply into his own eyes, as if he were looking for someone there: either a self, or a stranger.

* * *

For three days Edward lay as if dead. For three days Bella waited numbly beside him, eating indifferently when food was brought to her, sleeping when she could no longer keep her eyes open, waking on the cot that someone had set up for her in a corner of the room and dragging herself up to sit by the bed once more. Occasionally she spoke to Charlie on the phone, and by the awkwardly hesitant concern in his voice, she gathered that someone had told him of the seriousness of Edward's condition. He didn't ask for more information, though, and she didn't offer any.

She watched and listened as the final preparations were made. The temperature of the room was gradually raised, to bring Edward's body closer to the temperature of human flesh. They set up the heart monitor, and when it was switched on, the flat line and steady tone made Bella's blood run cold; she had seen too many medical shows, where that sound meant death. Rosalie quickly silenced the monitor, but the flat glowing line remained.

As Carlisle worked, he explained everything that he did to Bella, who watched over his shoulder. He intubated Edward, placing a tube in his windpipe and preparing an airway for them to help him to breathe. He minutely examined Edward's hands and feet, muttering more to himself than to anyone else: "No sign of mortification of the extremities. The venom seems to hold the body in stasis even after it has withdrawn. Good – very good."

Finally, she watched as Carlisle readied the transfusion sites. Working with the precision of a jewel-cutter, he found the long-empty veins, inserted intravenous lines, and slowly and carefully opened the arteries with a saline solution to make them more receptive to the blood they would need to pour into his body. _We are helping him_, Bella insisted to herself, fighting her squeamish reaction as Carlisle manipulated the disconcertingly large needles. _This is what will make him live._

For three days she watched, breathless. For three days, the house hung in limbo, in the gap between the inhale and exhale, the abyss between one footfall and the next.

For three days she waited. On the third day, something happened.

* * *

**A/N: Hi there! Me again! So, I totally geeked out on this chapter. But the amazing thing? All the stuff about _T. gondii_ is TRUE! Isn't that incredible? If you're even minutely interested, you should go check out my profile, where I have a link to a radio show called Radiolab, which is an NPR show that combines incredible storytelling with really fascinating science. They did a whole show on parasites that completely blew my mind, and they tell the _T. gondii_ story better than I ever could. You can choose to listen just to the segment about cats and rats, but I urge you to listen to the whole thing, and other Radiolab shows too. They're amazing. Make my little nerd heart go pitter-pat.**


	14. Chapter 14

**Endless love to everyone who is reading. The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer, but my words are mine. I wish my heart were as cold as the morning dew, Mllebojangles, but it's warm as saxophones and honey in the sun for you.**

* * *

14

"Soon," murmured Alice. "Soon."

Alice stood at the foot of the operating table, her vision gone so far inward that she stared, unblinking and unseeing, through Edward's still form. Jasper stood just behind her, his hands on her shoulders, supporting and anchoring her.

Carlisle was a blur of activity, checking monitors and IV lines. Esme was a half-step behind him, attuned to his every move, always ready with an instrument or a steadying hand on a piece of tubing before he had to ask.

Rosalie stood at the head of the table, impatiently flexing the hand-operated breathing valve bag that would soon be attached to the tube emerging from Edward's mouth. She stared down at Edward, her expression unreadable. From the other side of the room, Emmett watched Rosalie, glowering.

Bella hovered uncertainly. The heat of the room, now nearly ninety degrees, was making her dizzy. Her heart pounded so hard that she was sure the others heard it.

No one had called them all in; no one had signaled that the moment of crisis had come. But throughout the day they drifted in and out, singly or in pairs, joining Bella in her vigil by Edward's side, and as the day wore on they all found themselves less and less likely to leave. It was as if they all knew the timing of the venom's decay, as if they could feel it calling to their own.

"Soon," whispered Alice.

Bella plucked weakly at the front of her shirt, trying to move the air. She felt sure that there wasn't enough oxygen in the room. No one else seemed to be bothered by the heat. _Hold it together, Bella,_ she told herself. _You won't help anyone if you pass out._ She took deep breaths, steadying herself.

Gradually she became aware of the utter stillness of the room. The others had completely stopped moving; five sets of eyes were trained laser-like on the still shape on the table. Her heartbeat accelerated as she looked from one face to another. Long seconds passed. Her hands were shaking. _Oh please, oh please,_ she repeated in her mind, unable even to finish the thought. _Please, oh please._

Alice raised her head slowly. "It's happening," she said, her voice suffused with awe. "Now."

Edward jerked on the table. His mouth gaped open, and there was a horrible rattle as his lungs dragged at the air. The flat line on the heart monitor trembled, then bent into jagged peaks: one, two. Two loud beeps into the silence, then the line went flat. His body collapsed on the table.

And still everyone was motionless, staring, locked in some kind of existential fascination. Bella looked at their faces, panic rising. Surely this wasn't part of the plan. At last the cry broke free from her: "_Carlisle! _He's dying!"

He jumped, jolted from his paralysis, looking first at her then at Edward, horrified. He roared, "_Move!_"

At this, everyone crashed into motion. Immediately the IV bags were opened, and blood coursed down through the plastic tubing into the lines that Carlisle had inserted into Edward's arms and legs, and the two thick tubes that went in under his collarbones. Rosalie swiftly attached the bag to his breathing tube and began to squeeze it in a slow steady rhythm. Machines and monitors whirred; the blood poured into Edward's body. After what felt like an eternity but was actually only a few seconds, Carlisle called, "Now, Bella!"

Emmett's voice said in her ear, "Just like we practiced," and then two strong hands at her waist hoisted her up onto the table. Bella straddled Edward's torso, kneeling above him. She locked her elbows, laced the fingers of one hand into the other, pressed her palm to his chest just left of center, and became his heartbeat.

_Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. _She pushed down on his chest, neither too fast nor too slow, just as she had practiced over and over on the CPR dummy. She felt the thud and shift of his body with each impact, but still she went on. Be strong, she told herself, as strong as Edward. _Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. _Force the new blood through his veins. Send it to his lungs, to pick up the air that Rosalie was giving him. Send it all around his body, to wake up everything that was sleeping. Be his heartbeat, until his heart might beat on its own.

_Let me be your heart,_ she thought between strokes. _Let me bring you back to life._

Around her there was shouting and frantic movement; she barely registered it. She stared down at his face, at the milk-white skin beneath her hands. _Pulse. Pulse. Pulse._ The heat pressed in around her. This was the job that only she could do, Carlisle had told her. If one of the others tried it, they might break his ribs. She in her human frailty was the only one strong enough to restart his heart.

Something near her hands snapped; her left arm and the side of her face were spattered thickly with warm liquid. Blood poured out onto Edward's chest, startlingly dark and vivid against his skin. She heard a cry, sharply bitten off, and a hiss. "Control yourself," Esme's voice snarled. Hands came into her field of vision, reattaching the IV line that had come undone, swiping at the blood.

Still she continued. Sweat ran in runnels down her neck, between her breasts; sticky tendrils of hair stuck to her face, but she couldn't stop to push them away. _Pulse. Pulse. Pulse._

At last: "Enough, Bella."

She pushed herself off Edward's body and half-fell off the operating table; someone caught her and righted her. She leaned against the edge of the table, breathing hard. There was a high-pitched whine, almost above her range of hearing. "Clear!" cried Carlisle harshly. Someone dragged her away from the table. Alice brought two paddles down onto Edward's chest; there was a dull explosion, and Edward's body jerked heavily. Still a flat line on the monitor. "Again!" Another jolt; another flat line.

"Damn it! He needs more blood." New bags were being attached to some of the IV stands.

"Oxygen and red cell counts still dangerously low," said Rosalie.

"Chest compressions, Bella," barked Carlisle, and she found herself heaved up onto the table once more.

And it began again, the rhythm jarring her brain and rattling her bones, the heat like a choke-hold around her throat. Her sweat-slick hands slipped against the clammy skin of his chest. Again, and again, and again, and she could never stop, because it was Edward and he was hovering somewhere between life and death. She lost herself in the heat and the rhythm, pounding with her arms, her shoulder joints grating in their sockets. She would never stop.

Was it possible that the skin under hands was less wax-doll white than it had been? Was there the faintest blush creeping under the pallor?

It might have been minutes, or it might have been hours. Somewhere voices were speaking; someone took her around the waist and pulled her off the table again. She struggled, crying out. "It's ok, Bella – it's enough," said Jasper's voice in her ear, and she belatedly realized what was happening. She sagged in Jasper's arms, half-fainting, on legs that would barely support her.

"Clear!" cried Carlisle again.

Alice brought the paddles down. Edward jerked, and Bella winced. "Again!" The line lay flat. "Again!" Carlisle bellowed.

Thud, and jerk.

This time, the line bent into peaks. _Beep. Beep. Beep._

The tiny sound filled the room as they all stared, motionless. Jasper exhaled all at once. Bella gaped uncomprehending at the monitor, at Edward, barely understanding what she was seeing.

The rhythm held. It was slow, but it didn't falter.

_It's beating,_ she thought. _His heart is beating._

"It worked," said Esme softly, wonder in her voice.

Emmett gave a great whoop of delight, breaking the spell. Alice screeched and launched herself at Jasper, who caught her and whirled her around. Someone – Emmett – caught Bella up in a crushing hug, planted a bruising kiss near the corner of her mouth, and dropped her back to the floor. She staggered against the edge of the table, but he didn't notice – he rushed off to Esme, seizing her hands and dancing her around in a circle until she laughed helplessly and begged him to stop.

Bella stood silent at the center of their jubilation, as silent as Edward. She didn't feel happy; she didn't feel anything, only numbness. Slowly she looked up at Carlisle, across the table from her. His arms were braced and trembling against the table and his head hung down between his shoulders, his eyes closed. He looked the way Bella felt – exhausted, battered, utterly drained. He looked _ancient._

He raised his head and looked straight at Bella. In the still core of silence around them, his eyes said to her, _You don't know how close we came._

Out loud, he said softly, "Go clean yourself up, Bella." Then, looking around wearily, he said, "Enough, everyone. There is more to be done."

Bella obeyed without even thinking, slipping away unnoticed. The hallway outside felt blessedly cool after the tropical heat of their makeshift operating room, but she soon began to shiver. The hallway was dark; she realized that she had absolutely no idea what time it was. Time had seemed to stop in the operating room. She stumbled toward the bathroom on legs that were perilously close to cramping, and fumbled for the light switch. When the light snapped on, she gasped at the apparition in the mirror. Her skin was ashen pale, her eyes dark and staring, but the left side of her face and body were spattered with blood. She looked like a victim in a slasher movie. Belatedly she remembered the IV tube that had broken while she worked on Edward – it had snapped up and sprayed her with blood, which had been on her ever since.

Shuddering, she dampened a washcloth.

As she wiped at the rusty red spots, she willed her heart to stop racing. The energy that she had gotten from the adrenaline pounding through her body was waning, and now she felt shaky and sick. _But it worked,_ she said, staring into her own huge dark eyes in the mirror. _His heart is beating. His body still works, and the venom is gone._ She should have been ecstatic. So why did she feel so apprehensive?

_We don't know yet if he's going to wake up,_ said a little voice inside her. Her body tensed painfully at the thought, but her inner eye presented her with the image of the rest of the Cullens, motionless and staring as Edward's heart began to beat and then stopped. Why had they done that? Why hadn't they moved right away? Had their inaction caused a crucial delay? What if Edward's brain was irreparably damaged?

She put down the washcloth. Carlisle would know what to do. Edward would wake up – he had promised he'd come back. She had to trust him. She splashed her face with water and fixed her ponytail, a vast and inexorable exhaustion slowing and dulling her movements. Weaving on unsteady legs, she made her way back to join the others.

Stepping through the door felt like walking into a wall. The heat was choking and oppressive and nearly made her stagger. Around Edward's table was a gyre of activity, in which there was no room for Bella. She dropped into a chair at the side of the room.

All of Edward's IV lines and breathing tubes had been connected to a machine by the side of his bed, a great box on wheels that whirred and hummed and clicked. _Cardiopulmonary bypass,_ something prompted in Bella's memory. The heart-lung machine. It would take over the function of Edward's heart and lungs, cycling and warming and aerating his blood, simultaneously ensuring continued circulation and raising his body temperature until he was no longer in danger from hypothermia.

All of these were good things, Bella told herself. All of these were necessary. Still, the sight of him hooked up to machines made her skin crawl. She couldn't shake the feeling of dread.

The others raced around the table, calling out to each other about blood pressure and epi injections and absorption levels. What they were doing was far beyond her ability to help. Bella let her head fall back against the wall. She felt simultaneously twitchy and lethargic, wishing she could do something, afraid to go near him for fear that something might go wrong.

In flashes between the movements around the room, she caught sight of him, still and cold and corpse-like on the table. _Hold on,_ she thought fiercely at him. _Hold on._

Minutes ticked infinitesimally by and Bella began to drift in and out of consciousness. In the bizarre haze of nightmare logic, she began to feel that the whole room was throbbing with terrible heat, pulsating like a heart itself, and she somehow knew that if she let herself fall asleep, the heart – Edward's heart – would stop beating. Over and over she jolted herself blearily awake, only to drift again.

Minutes became hours, and Bella thought the night would never end.

Edward had two seizures during the night. Twice she awoke to panicked shouting and a terrible rattling sound, as his body arched and shook on the table. The first time it happened, she leapt terrified out of her chair. He subsided after frantic scrambling and injections of medication. Bella stood staring and confused, watching uncertainly. Esme came to her side and helped her back to her chair.

"It's ok, Bella," she said, putting her arm around Bella's shoulders. "Edward is ok."

Bella seized Esme's hand in a moment of clarity. "Is he rejecting the blood transfusion?" she asked in a low voice.

Esme's forehead creased with worry, but her voice stayed calm. "Carlisle can keep the seizures under control," she said soothingly, and Bella slumped back into her chair, sick and exhausted. It was only later as she was drifting into a half-conscious daze that she realized that Esme hadn't actually answered her question, which of course jolted her out of sleep once more.

_Carlisle,_ she thought wearily. _Carlisle will save him._

And then it was back to sleeping and waking or something in between, and her mind wove the sights and sounds around her into feverish dreams until she didn't know what was real and what was delirium. Once she woke cradled in someone's arms as he carried her to the cot in the corner; Emmett's voice rumbled softly, "Go back to sleep," as he laid her down. She propped her head on her arm so that she could still see what was going on at the center of the room, and then it began again, the heat and the pressure and the beating of a great heart where she and Edward stood on precipices with a great abyss between them.

It was a very long night.

The silence woke her close to dawn. Someone had opened the curtains; the light was softly gray and the room was still. There was a blanket over her but she was cold and clammy where the sweat had cooled on her skin. _The room is back to normal temperature,_ she thought. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? She raised her head infinitesimally, and even that slight movement made her body ache. The whirring and clicking was gone; the heart-lung machine had been pushed aside, its monitors still and its yards of tubing looped up and put away. The room was empty but for Esme, who sat hunched over a laptop on the other side of the room, and the table and its occupant. Bella's heart swooped sickeningly in her chest at the sight of his utter stillness.

She was about to throw off the blanket when Carlisle came into the room. Something kept her where she was.

"Is there any change?"

Esme looked up, and her face was weary. "No," she answered. "The readings are the same. No better, but no worse, and that's good news, at least."

Carlisle unhooked a stethoscope from around his neck and listened to Edward's chest. "The brain scans?"

"Inconclusive," Esme said. "As you predicted." Carlisle put down his stethoscope. "His brain…" she began tentatively. "The oxygen…"

"There's no way to know," he said shortly, scrubbing a hand through his hair in frustration. "Damn me and my arrogance. I thought it would be so easy. It took so much longer than I thought it would to get his heart started again." His head bowed, and the room was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was gentler. "The hypothermia should have helped to protect his brain while it was deprived of oxygen. That was part of the plan all along. Now we must wait to see whether it was enough."

"Carlisle." Esme's voice was quiet but insistent. "There is an alternative, of course. If he doesn't wake up." Carlisle shook his head dismissively, but she continued. "I know you don't want to hear it, but it's a very real possibility. His brain could be damaged beyond its capability to heal itself. You know that we can change him back – one bite and the venom will heal him. We know from Alice's case that it can repair brain damage."

_No! _thought Bella in horror. _Not after all we've done._

Carlisle sighed heavily. "It would break his heart, and Bella's," he said, his voice thick with sorrow. "Imagine Edward on waking not as a human but as a newborn vampire. Would you want to be the one to tell him that we'd had to change him back? I would be afraid of his rage."

"Still," persisted Esme. "If it meant life over death."

Carlisle was silent. At last, he nodded. "If we must. And only if we must."

Bella could hear Esme's quiet footsteps as she walked around the table. She leaned over Edward, feeling his forehead, stroking his hair. "What a beautiful boy," she murmured. "He has always been striking, of course, but I never saw him like this." She smiled. "He makes a beautiful human. You chose the loveliest children, Carlisle."

Carlisle came to her side, and his arm found its way around her waist. "And the loveliest wife," he said quietly. His face was soft as he looked down on his son, his first and dearest. "He looks now just the way I remember him from all those years ago."

"Human beauty," Esme said wonderingly. "Perhaps it is so dear because it is so fleeting." She leaned over Edward and kissed his forehead.

Carlisle braced himself against the table. "I envy him, in a way," he said. "I wish I could sleep. I haven't slept in three hundred years."

Bella shivered under her blanket.

"You should rest," said Esme. "I'll stay with him."

"There's no rest for me," said Carlisle wearily. "Rosalie and Emmett are waiting for me. They're both ready to re-launch their arguments, no doubt." He sighed. "Call me at once if there is any change."

"I will."

He kissed her and left.

Bella waited until the room had been quiet for a few minutes, then she threw off her blanket and sat up. Esme was back at her laptop, and Edward lay on the table, silent and still. Bella climbed out of her cot and crept toward the table, her heart in her throat. As she approached, a tiny sound grew louder: _beep, beep, beep,_ low and steady. The heart monitor.

It was true, then. His heart was still beating. He was alive.

Something rushed through her then, something too painful to be joy, too sharp to be relief. She let out a sound like a whimper. At the noise, Esme looked up, but Bella's eyes were riveted on Edward, on the faint color in his cheeks, the slight rise and fall of his chest under the blanket.

"Bella." There was the lightest touch on her shoulder; Esme's hand.

"He's sleeping," Bella whispered.

Esme sighed softly. "He's in a coma, my love," she said. "He needs some time to finish healing. But his body temperature is back up to normal, and his heart is strong."

"He's breathing," Bella said. "He's breathing on his own."

"For the last hour or so," said Esme, agreeing. "Carlisle disconnected him from the ventilator and his lungs took over. These are all good signs."

One narrow tube was left, snaking out of his nostril and taped in place against his cheek. "What's that tube?" Bella asked, hating the sight of it. She had twisted her fingers into the sheet, and she untangled them, willing her hands to be still.

"It's a feeding tube that goes down to his stomach. We don't know how long he will be in a coma, and his body needs nourishment now."

"When will he wake up?"

"We must be patient, dearest."

Her hands had knotted themselves together again; she realized that she was repressing a tremendous urge to touch his skin, to stroke her fingers through his hair. "Can I…" she faltered. "Can I touch him?"

She could hear the smile in Esme's voice, though her eyes never left Edward. "Of course, Bella. You won't hurt him."

Edward's hand lay on top of the sheet. Hesitantly, as if for the first time, she touched the back of his hand, then curled her fingers underneath to his palm. The not-quite-joy, not-quite-pain rushed through her again. His skin was smooth and pliable, cool but not colder than anyone's hand might be. She squeezed his hand. In the pressure of her grip, she could feel her own pulse in her fingers, and there, slower but undeniable, she felt his as well.

Esme moved softly away, but Bella didn't notice her going. With her free hand she wiped impatiently at the tears that fell through her lashes. She touched his cheek, as gently as if he might bruise at the brush of her fingertips.

For the first time, she studied Edward's human face.

He was different – there were a hundred tiny differences. His nose was different, perhaps a bit longer, a bit more narrow, with a hint of a bump at the bridge. His hair had lost its metallic sheen, but still rioted in unruly whorls of copper and gold. His eyelashes lay dark against his cheek. His lips were less red, less full, but soft in repose. She tried to imagine this mouth smiling, speaking, mobile and expressive. The line of his jaw was softer, less chiseled, and his skin though pale was no longer marble-white.

It was a handsome face, beautiful in a way that was fathomable and imperfect and wholly human. There was nothing alien, nothing frightening in it. For the first time, she could glimpse the child that he had been, and she could imagine the man that he would become.

Her brain felt bleary and blurred, but there was one clear thought like a beam of light arrowing to the surface of her mind. _This is the crux of it_, she thought. _This is the key._ Here was the great difference between vampire and human: not venom, not blood, not strength or beauty or the need for sleep, but change. Vampires never changed, while humans did nothing but change. For all their stubborn insistence on their own continuity, every human was a perpetual motion machine, a constantly-shifting composite of thoughts and emotions and motivations ever at odds with itself, and the consciousness, the "I am" floating above it, was the veil of mist over an ever-changing river. A vampire, however, was a fixed point, unchanging and immutable. Edward had stood outside of time, and she had never been able to imagine him changing, because change had been lost to him forever.

_Until we tore down the walls_. Outside, dawn was just touching the trees, and it broke over her like a great epiphany. By luck and strength of will (and both great courage and great foolhardiness) Edward had put himself back on the path where Bella walked.

_We've done it,_ she thought deliriously. _And now that we've done this, oh, what couldn't we do?_ For an instant, a shining instant, she felt that all the moments of her life and his, all possible permutations of their ever-shifting selves, were simultaneously present. The curtains between past and present and future shivered and grew thin as gossamer, and she trembled with power.

And then the light dimmed, and the present grew solid while the past and future receded. She struggled to hold onto the sweet clarity that had filled her mind, but it too slipped away before she knew how to stop it, and she was once more just a girl holding the hand of a sleeping boy.

She looked down at his face, feeling drained and somehow lessened. _He's not going to remember me,_ she thought with a sudden dreadful certainty. _When we restarted his heart, we gave life back to the boy who died ninety years ago. My own Edward was only a collection of thoughts and memories, and those are gone, as surely as yesterday will never come again._ A great weariness and sorrow settled heavily over her shoulders.

So when he woke surrounded by strangers, what then? Maybe he would recognize Carlisle, his doctor from his sickness. Maybe he would believe their story. Maybe he might come to know her, if she stayed by his side and cared for him through his convalescence.

Maybe he might come to love her.

But how would he feel, learning that he had been taken a century forward from his own time? How would he react, finding that his family and everyone he'd known was gone? How could he love the person who was the cause of the utter devastation of his life? He would go away, she thought. He would leave, looking for answers, and never come back – he would leave the monsters behind, and the girl who had fallen in love with a boy who didn't exist anymore.

Bella's imagination was spinning out of control. She scrubbed at her eyes. She was exhausted, and she wasn't making any sense, not even to herself.

_Sleep_, she thought. _I need to sleep._

She stumbled back to the cot, burrowed under the blanket, and slept, and waited.

* * *

In the end, they waited a week.

There had been so much waiting already, so much anticipation and anxiousness and days of stress and nights of worry. Bella found herself curiously serene as she waited beside her sleeping beloved. Time seemed to have stopped, and she felt that she could wait forever.

Not always, of course. She had moments of terror when she woke gasping, moments in the long stretched-out evenings when she could almost feel her mind cracking under the strain. But it was always temporary; always she sighed, and shook herself slightly, and felt the distress drift out like a tide. It was always near, but always manageable, and she didn't have to fear it.

Jasper was often nearby, and his quiet calm presence steadied her.

She watched the rest of the family as they orbited Edward's silent bed. Rosalie watched Edward and Emmett watched Rosalie, and the daggers in his eyes spoke volumes. Carlisle and Esme monitored Edward tirelessly, and all the while they seemed to speak in eloquent glances traded over the tops of everyone else's heads.

_Will he wake?_

_ Give him time._

_ Dare we wait?_

_ We must. A bit longer._

_ We cannot wait forever._

Bella silently willed them to wait yet longer.

As for Alice, she had taken up a post opposite Bella at the other side of the bed. She rarely spoke, but focused on Edward with an otherworldly single-mindedness. Her vision was still jumbled and cloudy, but she reported flashes of foresight that kept her riveted, desperate for more. She would know when he would wake, she insisted, but she might not know until just before it happened.

_What a crowd we are,_ Bella thought. _Healers and dreamers, crazy in our faith. Seven who cannot sleep waiting for one to wake._

She felt a presence by her side, and she looked up and saw Carlisle. As if he had been listening to her thoughts, he gave her a weary smile and squeezed her shoulder.

She slept, and woke, and slept again. She ate the food that was brought to her, and sometimes when they forgot to bring her food she went foraging in the Cullens' sterile kitchen. She spoke occasionally to Charlie on the phone, and once to her mother. They knew Edward was in a coma and wanted to speak words of sympathy and comfort, but Bella always extricated herself from their conversations as quickly as she could. Their fear and ignorance reached in long grasping tendrils down the phone lines and Bella fled, trying to stay out of their grip.

Seven days, seven nights, and her thoughts played on a distant loop like far-off music.

_Will he know me when he wakes?_

_ Will he know me when he wakes?_

_ Will he know me when he wakes?_

On the eighth morning, Alice told Carlisle to remove Edward's feeding tube.

* * *

"Bella," said Alice suddenly, jolting her out of a drifting reverie.

Bella looked at Alice, who was looking down. Edward's fingers were twitching, the movement slight but undeniable. As they watched, frozen in place, his lips parted ever so slightly, and he breathed a deeper breath. His chest rose and fell, and the tiniest of sighs escaped him.

Alice leapt up, knocking her chair over backward, and bolted toward the door. "Carlisle!" she called as she dashed away through the house. "Esme! Come quick!"

Bella was suddenly hot and cold all over. Trembling, she took Edward's hand, careful of the IV taped there.

"Edward," she said softly. "Edward, I'm here."

His head turned infinitesimally toward the sound of her voice. She stroked the hair away from his forehead, caressed his cheek so that he would feel her touch. "Please wake up," she begged. "Please come back to me." _You promised._

He made a sound, so soft that she thought she imagined it, but then it came again, louder. "Mmm… muh… muh…"

_Oh no,_ she thought. _Oh please, no._

His hand moved in hers, and he turned his head again, pressing his cheek into her palm. He was silent for a long moment, then breathed more deeply, as if gathering himself. Bella was barely breathing.

"Mother?" he whispered, and his voice sounded younger than she had ever heard it. Bella bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. "Mother, I dreamed…"

Then he opened his eyes, and Bella was lost.

His eyes were green, green as high summer, green as the promise of spring. Green a million miles deep: ancient forests and hidden glens, sunlight flashing through leaves and the shadows of clouds on a hillside. Green as a continent untouched; green as life pushing toward the sun.

For an instant – for just an instant – his eyes, fixed on hers, were as wide and innocent as a child's, as clear of grief and fear and regret as if he'd spent every day of his life in the sunlight.

Then something shifted. Something awoke, impossibly far down in the depths of that matchless green; something that struggled limping toward the surface. He blinked slowly, and the eyes that opened again were no less shocking, no less beautiful, but somehow simultaneously cleared and clouded. For just a fraction of a second, pain shot through Bella as if for some inexplicable loss, some lovely thing shattered. Then he blinked again, as if truly waking for the first time. His breath came in a whisper.

"Bella?"

Her heart gave a great leap. "Yes," she cried softly, holding his hand tightly between hers and pressing it to her chest. Tears sprang to her eyes, and the green wavered and blurred as she blinked them furiously away. "Yes, Edward," she repeated, "it's me."

If she had looked behind her, she would have seen Alice in the doorway, eyes shining like stars, the family ranged around her. But nothing could have torn her attention from Edward.

"It's you," he said softly. "It… it wasn't a dream."

The windchimes were gone from his voice, the beautiful and terrible resonance like far-away horns, and the tears spilled from her eyes for the loss of them, as well as for the pure and vulnerable boyish beauty of his human voice. "No, it wasn't a dream," she said, her voice throbbing with an overflow of joy and grief. "We brought you back. You came back to me."

"I told you I would," he said, and his mouth turned up at one corner into a shadow of the crooked smile that she knew so well, the one that never failed to stop her breathless. And suddenly, after everything, there he was looking back at her: her own Edward, awake, alive, breathing, with the entire future in his eyes.

"It worked," she whispered. "It really worked. Your heart is beating. You're alive – you're as human as I am."

His face was as naked as an open window, and she saw the emotions flash there one after the other: awe, disbelief, relief, and deep in the shadows, fear and sorrow. They washed over him in a moment, and then he sighed, his eyes drifting closed.

"Human," he whispered.

Bella held tight to his hand, and felt rather than saw the rest of the family gather around the bed. Edward opened his eyes with an effort, returning their joyful, gentle greetings with a smile, submitting to Carlisle's stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, his eyes flickering from face to face. Bella found herself instead watching his chest rise and fall with breath, the involuntary blinking of his eyes, the tremble of a pulse at the hollow of his neck. She hardly heard the words being said, until Carlisle asked Edward how he felt.

Edward paused, and the room stilled. "Tired?" he said at last, hesitantly. "And pretty weak. And…" He looked confused for a moment, brows drawing together, his free hand sliding to his stomach. "Hungry?"

He looked up with such consternation and surprise on his face that everyone burst into laughter, and Esme bustled off to the kitchen with promises of extravagant delicacies as soon as she figured out how to cook them. The others crowded around, giddy and exuberant, gleeful in their heady success. Rosalie teased him with uncharacteristic gentleness, and Jasper joined in. Alice bounced around like a five-year-old hopped up on candy, and Emmett clowned for Edward's benefit like an oversized puppy. Edward smiled at their gibes, responded occasionally, but the words and the laughter washed over Bella. The others didn't matter, ultimately. She clung tightly to Edward's hand.

When Carlisle finally shooed them away and there was quiet around the bed again, Bella asked this new impossible person, "How do you feel, really?"

He lay breathing softly for a moment, his face still. "I couldn't hear any of them," he said at last, and she realized belatedly that he was talking about hearing their thoughts. "It's a bit as if I have cotton balls in my ears – it's quiet. It's wonderful. And you –" He smiled at her, that same sweet beautiful smile. "I can't smell your blood. I can't even remember what it smelled like. It's gone, Bella. The torment and the constant battling. It's all over."

She was speechless, so she raised his hand and kissed it, the smooth yielding skin, the knuckles one by one. His hand hung heavy in hers, unsupported.

He noticed. "I think I must be very weak," he admitted. "It feels like my body is made of stone."

"That will get better once you eat something and get moving." Bella smiled. "Maybe I should go make sure that Esme isn't burning down the kitchen."

He smiled his softest, weariest smile, then let out a low sigh, eyes heavy. "Bella, can you open the window? Or turn on the light? It's so dark in here."

Bella looked around, a sinking feeling in her stomach. It was mid-morning, the curtains were open, and the soft gray daylight was flooding the room as much as it ever did. "Edward – it's the middle of the day," she said. "The curtains are already open." When he twisted around to look toward the wide windows, brow creased in confusion, she added hesitantly, "Are your eyes ok?"

"Strange," he whispered, blinking fast. "Everything… everything looks a little darker. It's just strange."

His eyes met hers again, and even as she melted involuntarily into that astonishing green regard, the guilt gripped her stomach. _He gave it up for me…_

To cover her worry, she said, "Is there anything you want? Is there anything I can get you?"

He drew breath to speak, but winced hard, his hand going to his chest. He laboriously unbuttoned the top button of his pajama shirt, and then Bella helped him with the rest, her anxiety mounting as his shirt opened.

There on the pale skin of his chest bloomed a huge bruise, mottled purple and black at the center, sickly greenish yellow around the edges. High on his chest, just left of his breastbone, over his heart.

"Oh God," Bella heard herself saying as she touched his skin. "Oh God, the CPR. I did this to you. Oh Edward, I'm so sorry."

"No!" He grabbed her hands. "Don't be sorry, Bella. Don't you dare be sorry," he said fiercely, although his voice was quickly subsiding. "You brought me back to life," he whispered. "_You_ brought me back."

Shocked by his outburst, she could only nod, and he fell back on the pillows, breathing hard. With the last of his strength, he pulled her down to lie beside him. His eyes were drooping.

"Stay with me?" he whispered as he nestled into her arms.

"Of course," she said. "Always." And she bent her head and kissed him. The feel of his mouth, the taste of his breath, all the newness barely registered – there was time enough for all of that later, for he was already asleep.

She laid her dark head beside his riotous bronze one, and watched him sleep.


	15. Chapter 15

**This is it, people. This is the end. The monkey is off my back.**

**If anyone is still reading this, I send you my love and eternal thanks, as well as a slightly puzzled look. =) Seriously, this has been tremendous fun, and you have all been lovely. I wrote this for myself, but your kind words have been such a fantastic added bonus. Much love to everyone.  
**

**Mllebojangles, I can't even. You're the most wonderfullest of them all.  
**

**The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer; the writing belongs to me.  
**

**Peace out, the fandom.  
**

* * *

15

"Here! Here! I'm open! I'm open!" cried Alice, hopping from foot to foot and waving her arms over her head.

Jasper hesitated, weighing his options, and threw the frisbee instead to Carlisle, who was being closely covered by Emmett. Predictably enough, Emmett knocked Carlisle easily aside and snatched the disc out of the air, then backhanded it like a missile to Rosalie who had coasted to the end of the yard for an easy point.

Carlisle picked himself up out of the grass, looking aggrieved. Rosalie and Emmett, despite being at a three-to-two disadvantage, were winning handily. Alice shrieked at Jasper, "I was open, you big lout!"

Edward laughed so hard that he almost snorted his milkshake out through his nose.

He and Bella sat side-by-side in adirondack chairs at the edge of the yard, watching as the rest of the Cullens played a raucous (and, frequently, rule-bending) game of ultimate – the rest of the Cullens except Esme, of course, who could only ever be found in the kitchen anymore. She had turned herself overnight into a champion-level short order cook, fulfilling Edward's every whim. Today, it was milkshakes and BLTs, served on the lawn. The day before had been pancakes for every meal. Carlisle had finally put his foot down and ended the massive influx of junk food into the house when he discovered the huge bag of Doritos stashed under Edward's bed; Esme's argument that "he should eat whatever he wants!" fizzled when she looked at the ingredients listed on the bag and didn't recognize anything as food. But that didn't preclude her from feeding him ice cream and cookies, butter and bacon and cheese to her heart's content, and meanwhile Jasper and Emmett smuggled him a steady supply of candy bars.

Edward insisted that he had ninety years of food to catch up on, including Doritos. Bella was delighted to see him eating and regaining strength, and in the meantime, she noticed that she herself was losing the gaunt and haunted look she'd developed over her weeks of vigil. There was color in her face again, and once more some roundness in her figure. She frequently caught Edward's eyes lingering there, making her cheeks flush even more with pleasure.

But for now she laughed to see him laughing, and pounded him on the back when he nearly choked on his milkshake, and munched on her BLT in the soft gray daylight. It had been nearly two weeks since he had awakened, nearly two weeks as a human.

"I wouldn't have thrown it to Alice either," Edward confided as soon as his coughing subsided. "She gets all excited and takes off running every time. Vampire brain _plus_ the ability to see the future, and somehow she always forgets the rules of the game."

Bella laughed. On the field, the others were setting up for a new play. Esme arrived to clear away their plates from lunch, and she fussed with the blanket she had laid over Edward's lap.

Edward protested. "I'm not an invalid, Mom," he said.

Esme snorted incredulously. "I'll believe that when I see you running around out there with your brothers," she said. Edward made a face, and she kissed him on the top of his head to take the sting from her words. "This is the first day you've even been outside," she said gently. "Take it slowly, my darling. Just seeing you awake and talking is my heart's delight." She bustled away with the plates, half no-nonsense nurse, half doting mother.

Edward was quiet, watching her go. "She's been worried about you for a long time," Bella said. "She loves having this chance to make a fuss over you."

He turned back to her with a smile. "Oh, no doubt," he said lightly. "She's in mother-hen heaven. Sometimes I think she'd prefer it if I stayed weak and wobbly forever, so that she could indulge her maternal instincts in perpetuity." Bella laughed, and he grinned, but his smile dimmed as he turned back toward the yard.

On the grass, Emmett and Jasper were wrestling over the frisbee in a confused blur of vampire speed. Rosalie stood by, examining her fingernails and looking bored. Bella watched Edward carefully, but his expression was unreadable. After a long moment, he said softly, "Even when I'm up and running around with the others again, I'll never be able to keep up with them."

At times like this, the old Bella would have cringed and cried, falling over herself to apologize and self-deprecate. Instead she took his hand and waited. Edward had chosen, and he'd chosen her for a reason.

Sure enough, a moment later he turned back to her and kissed her fingers that were intertwined with his. "I don't regret what I did," he said. "I don't regret it at all."

She smiled and reached out to brush his hair out of his eyes. "I know," she said. The silken strands slid through her fingers, and she did it again for the sheer tactile pleasure of it. "But it's ok to regret it a little bit, I think," she added. "You know, for certain reasons. There are trade-offs."

"Of course," he said, his smile deepening, and he kissed her knuckles again. "But you're better than any amount of running and jumping and wrestling with my brothers."

"Mmm, I certainly hope so," she said mildly. After a moment her meaning sank in, and he truly laughed, long and unreservedly. Bella smiled as the sweet baritone echoes of his laughter washed over her like water.

"There's another kind of wrestling I'd like to try sometime," he said, smiling wickedly, his voice low. Bella felt the first stirring of desire inside her, but she let it lie. _We have time,_ she thought. _We have all the time we need._

"Let's just get you strong first," she said. "Once you can beat me at _arm_-wrestling, then we'll talk."

He let his head drop back against the chair. "It's so strange that I don't have to be so careful with you anymore," he said. He gave her hand an experimental squeeze, and she squeezed back. "I hated feeling like I couldn't really touch you. I hated knowing that if I forgot for one instant, I could break your arm or turn you black and blue. It was awful, always having to be so careful." His face – so open, so guileless – was troubled. Bella knew he was reliving the times when he wasn't careful, when he couldn't be careful. There was a twisted tangle of emotions there, which it would take him a long time to work through.

"Hey," said Bella, giving his arm a little shake. "That's all over now."

He looked up at her, and as always, the extraordinary green of his eyes astonished her. "Yeah," he said softly. "It's all over."

They shared that brief silence, green eyes looking into brown. Then a shout broke the spell and Edward looked out at the yard, where play had erratically resumed. Bella watched him, and he felt her watching, and didn't mind.

She studied his profile, the little bump at the bridge of his nose that she had come to love, the line of his jaw, the way his Adam's apple moved when he swallowed. It had taken him some time to build up the strength to get out of bed and walk, and she knew that he fretted about atrophied muscles and lost weight, but she thought he looked adorable: a beautiful skinny teenage boy. Looking at his broad shoulders and long limbs, she felt the desire stir in her again. She longed to climb into his lap and press her face into the side of his neck, but she took a slow breath and willed herself to wait. Vampire Edward would have sensed the acceleration of her heart, the slightest shift of her pheromones; her Edward now watched his siblings, oblivious to her fleeting hormonal turmoil. She smiled wryly to herself, grateful for this small allowance: the privacy of her own body.

As a rule, though, she didn't let her thoughts stray too far in that direction – not yet. As his body recovered, Edward could do little at night (and, honestly, for much of the day) but sleep. Carlisle and Esme, as sudden parents of a teenaged human, had proven to be unexpectedly conservative in that department, and much to Charlie's satisfaction, Bella spent her nights in her own bed at home.

Her body had its own opinions, however, and those would insist on being addressed soon. To cover an incipient grumble of frustration, she abruptly changed the subject. "Does everything still look darker to you?" she asked him.

"No, not really," he answered. "Maybe it never really looked darker. I think what I was missing was… I don't know…" He paused, struggling to explain. "Not color, not visual light exactly, but all of the other… the other layers?" He frowned. "The way I saw before, it was as if the colors and shapes of things were only one layer of the world. I could also see heat, and the way things smelled, and I knew where people were by where I heard their thoughts – they weren't really visual, all of those things, but they still made up part of my mental landscape."

Looking at him, Bella tried to imagine seeing him in all of those ways, and shook her head. "So maybe it's not that the world is darker, it's that it's less multi-dimensional," she said.

"Maybe," he said, and was silent for a long moment. Bella pulled her knees up to her chest. After a while, he spoke again. "But the way I see now, the way the colors look and the way people look, it feels… right. Already I'm beginning to forget how it was to see the other way, and when I try to remember, it just feels overwhelming."

Bella nodded slowly. She thought she could understand what he meant. She herself was already forgetting the time before his transformation, as if a great mental pivot point had been placed on the timeline of her life, dividing all of time into before the change and after the change. Everything before seemed dark, stressful, heavily fraught. Already the nights of terror and days of stomach-churning anxiety were becoming blurry in her memory. It was her mind's defense mechanism, she supposed. Selective post-traumatic amnesia.

She was also beginning to realize that she was forgetting Edward's face from before the change. She wasn't sure whether it had happened gradually, or all at once when he opened his eyes for the first time; she knew, however, that his human face had become more dear to her than all his vampire perfection had ever been. She had been at home a few days before, rifling through papers on her desk to look for something, when she had found a photograph of Edward that she'd taken before any of the madness began. It had startled her so badly that she'd sat down hard on her bed, hands trembling. The figure in the picture was beautiful, of course, beautiful and inhumanly perfect, but also, she realized for the first time, terrifying.

In a stupefying flash of alternate vision she had suddenly seen how _wrong_ her liaison with Edward had been, a perversion of nature, the predator lying with the prey. He had wanted to _drink her blood_. A long shudder of revulsion worked its way through her frame, until with a jerk she snapped out of it, forcing herself to remember the wonderful things about their relationship. He had wanted her blood, but he'd also loved her; he'd fought his hunger and had been impossibly gentle with her. In the end, it had worked.

But still. She had put the picture away in a drawer, face down.

_He wasn't for this world_, she thought, sitting beside him on the lawn. _And besides, I like mine better._

"Hmmm?" said Edward absently beside her, watching the game.

"I didn't say anything," she said.

"Oh. I thought I heard you say something."

"Nope," she answered. After a moment she looked at him sharply.

Coincidence. It had to be a coincidence.

Esme's voice interrupted her thoughts. "Bella, dear, it's almost 2:00," she said, arriving from the verandah to stand beside Edward's chair. "Dr. Wilson will be expecting you at 2:30."

"Right." Bella got up, her stomach abruptly full of butterflies. She had mentioned a few nights before that she ought to look for a job to carry her through the rest of the summer, and the next day Carlisle casually let drop that a colleague of his was interested in finding a part-time research assistant. Bella immediately protested that there were probably college students who were more qualified, to which Carlisle answered that Dr. Wilson hired a high school intern every summer and hadn't yet filled the position. Bella was skeptical, imagining a crotchety absent-minded old researcher with a beard as white as his coat, but agreed to speak with Dr. Wilson on the phone. She found to her surprise that the doctor was young, energetic-sounding, and female. The conversation had gone well, and Bella had agreed to meet her the next afternoon for something between an interview and a trial run in the lab.

Edward saw the queasy look on her face as she stood, and grinned at her. "Don't be nervous," he said. "She'll love you. You're brilliant."

Bella stooped to kiss his forehead, relishing that brief moment of contact. "And you should see how much homework you can do before I get back," she replied.

His expression soured. He hadn't finished high school with the rest of their class, and the humiliation of having to complete his degree by way of correspondence and summer school was a sore point with him. "I've already gone through high school dozens of times," he groused for the hundredth time. "I know more than all the teachers in that school put together."

"Then your homework should be easy," Bella said lightly. She leaned down again to kiss him and involuntarily lingered for a moment. His lips were warm and soft, and the smell and taste and feel of him were unutterably sweet, not from the milkshake but from something in his personal chemistry that called to her own. The instantaneous arc of attraction from her body to his whenever she kissed him never failed to stop Bella in her tracks. Reluctantly she pulled away, and there was a fully human look of hunger in his green eyes that made her heart stutter in her chest.

Esme was studiously pretending not to see, but there was a hoot from the yard, followed by Alice's elfin laughter and Rosalie saying, "Emmett, don't be an ass." Edward grinned, color rising in his cheeks. Bella had been utterly delighted when she discovered that Edward was almost as prone to blushing as she was.

Carlisle limped off the field and draped himself over Esme's shoulder. "Why these children won't play proper games is beyond me," he said. "I'm clearly too old for a game called 'ultimate.' How about some cricket for a change?"

"Oh, you're not fooling anyone," said Esme fondly.

Bella privately agreed. For all that he was a little rumpled and grass-stained, Carlisle looked the same as ever, straight and strong and capable. _And that's how he's always going to be,_ she thought, _for as long as Edward and I live._ The thought was somehow simultaneously unsettling and reassuring. He seemed to feel her gaze on him, and he turned to look at her, his light gold eyes meeting hers. There was always a smile in those eyes now, just for her – a smile of kinship, of shared trauma and shared triumph.

The others were approaching. "You have to leave already, Bella?" said Jasper.

"Yeah," she said. "My first big meeting with my potential boss." The nerves fluttered back to life in her stomach.

"I'm sure it will be fine," said Emmett, bluff as always. "Right, Alice? Bella will be great."

Alice smiled sadly, then mimed zipping her lips and locking them. "Sorry, Bella," she said.

"That's ok," Bella said. This was Alice's new policy, by her own choice: she shared nothing, good or bad, that her visions showed her of Bella and Edward's future. Not with the family, not with Bella and Edward themselves, not even with Jasper. And Bella was happy with this, though sometimes the curiosity drove her wild when she caught Alice looking at her with a faraway sad glance or with sparkling eyes and a mischievous smile.

_But we don't need to know_, she thought. Their future would happen as it happened.

"Oh, come on," Emmett was saying. "Just a hint. It can't hurt, can it, Alice?"

Edward's forehead creased.

"Leave it, Emmett," said Rosalie, a steely edge in her voice.

Bella had not failed to see how they stood on opposite sides of the little group. The easy camaraderie of the game had already vanished, and their bodies were tense, their words to each other terse and pointed.

Edward was looking down at his hands, and to Bella, his misery was palpable. Rosalie hadn't wavered in her desire to attempt the transformation herself, and Emmett still furiously forbade it. Rosalie hadn't begun her hunger strike yet, but every day she threatened it, and Edward had told Bella that every night she and Emmett screamed at each other until the rafters shook and Carlisle forcibly separated them.

Bella put her hand on Edward's shoulder. Emmett followed the motion with his eyes, then looked into her face. She hated what she saw in his glance: anger, confusion, misery of his own.

Esme had hurriedly turned the conversation to a lighter topic. Bella squeezed Edward's shoulder and prepared to go, but as she did, she felt a nudge in her mind, a lightening of anxiety, a little wave of well-being. She looked up and met Jasper's eyes. One corner of his mouth was quirked up in a half-smile. He bobbed his head once, a greeting, a farewell.

She smiled, hoping he could read her gratitude on her face. Then she turned to go, making her way toward the corner of the house, around to where her truck was parked in the driveway.

"Bye, Bella," called Alice.

"Knock 'em dead," said Edward.

"Not literally," said Carlisle.

She turned and waved, laughing. How strange, to think that she had once felt that they were all leaving her behind, when now it seemed the opposite. They were like a gallery of statues, beautiful and unreal, and she had walked among them for a while. As she reached the corner of the house she glanced behind her. The Cullens had turned inward, speaking among themselves, but Edward was watching her go. He lifted his hand in a wave.

As if he might hear her, she thought to him, _I'll always come back._

* * *

Every day Edward walked a little farther and felt a little stronger, and on a beautiful day in late August, he and Bella hiked up to the meadow. They left mid-morning before the sun had burned off the mist that clung to the forests, but as they climbed slowly above the low cloud line, the air grew warmer and drier.

It took them several hours to make the climb, stopping frequently to rest. Edward remembered the way and led them unerringly up the rough trail, but his steps got slower and slower as they went, and their cheerful conversation gradually gave way to silence and labored breathing. Just as Bella was beginning to wonder whether they had tried too much too soon, the forest lightened ahead of them, and in a few minutes more they emerged from the trees into the tiny cup-shaped valley nestled into the mountainside.

It was just as Bella remembered, ringed with dark trees, nodding with wildflowers, and full to the brim with sunlight. Overcome with emotion, she was about to clasp Edward's hand, when he staggered out into the sun, dropped his backpack with a thump, and unceremoniously flung himself to the ground, panting.

"Damn hills," he said. "I hate hills. Let's go to college somewhere without any hills."

She laughed and dropped to sit beside him in the grass. "The Midwest it is, then," she said agreeably, pulling off her backpack and digging through it. "I hear wonderful things about Nebraska."

He accepted the water bottle she handed him and drank long and deep. When he finished, he lay back with a contented sigh, one arm flung over his face against the sunlight. She lay down beside him, enjoying the sting of the bright day in eyes too long accustomed to cloud cover. After a moment Edward snaked an arm around her to pull her in, but she was hungry, so she squirmed out of his grasp.

"Lunch first," she said, finding the thin blanket she'd packed in her bag and spreading it on the grass. He groaned and rolled gracelessly onto the blanket, but when she started unpacking the food he sat up readily enough. He was always hungry now.

The trek up the hill had spurred both of their appetites, and they tore eagerly into the lunch they'd packed that morning. The sandwiches quickly disappeared, followed by the big sweet-tart apples Edward loved so much. Bella polished off her apple and pitched the core into the woods, while he was still gnawing his almost down to the pips.

She watched with a deepening smile while he hunted out the last few bites, then he flung the last shreds of core sidearm into the trees. He lay back on the blanket with a satisfied sigh. After a moment he held out his arm toward her, and she curled into his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder.

His breath was slow and steady. "The sun feels good," he said, and the sound rumbled through his chest. "Let's go to college somewhere sunny."

"Arizona," said Bella automatically. "Actually, no – I think I'd miss all the green. We could go to California."

"Or Florida," he said, beginning to smile. "We could stay with Renee and Phil."

"Ugh," said Bella with a shudder. "I thought you went to college to get away from your parents. How about the Northeast? That's sunny, right? And as far from both Charlie and Renee as I can possibly be while staying on the same continent?"

Edward laughed. "Sure – I can just see you in New England, where it's all humidity and mosquitoes in the summer and oh-god-why-have-you-forsaken-us cold in the winter. You wouldn't last a year."

"Are you calling me a wimp?"

"Maybe."

She poked him in the ribs, and he squirmed. Edward, she had discovered to her great joy, was ticklish. "I could do winter," she said. "I've always liked the idea of winter. I've never really lived anywhere with proper seasons like in books. Forks doesn't count. Rain and colder rain don't equal seasons."

He snorted a laugh, then looked down his nose at her appraisingly. "The idea of winter is quite different from the reality, you know. Imagine months of snow and ice and slush. It can be horrible."

"But then you also get heavy wool sweaters and snowball fights and hot chocolate afterwards," she replied, warming to her topic. "And snuggling up by the fireplace."

"Because so many college dorm rooms have fireplaces," he interjected.

"And I kind of like that it's so far away," she said, ignoring him. "I read a book about Boston when I was little and I've always wanted to go there. Just you and me together, a million miles away from everyone. It would be a completely new life."

"True," he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. "Boston, huh?"

She _hmmm_ed indistinctly into his shoulder, and they were both quiet for a moment, listening to the birds and the tiny _shush_ of the breeze through the grass. Bella was comfortable in the stillness, but she could almost hear Edward's mind whirring with thoughts. Since his transformation, she had had to learn his silences anew. Where before he had been moody and brooding, now he was meditative, deliberative; his brain was always going a mile a minute but he was more often silent than not. Bella knew that if she waited for him, he would share what was going on behind the silence.

It would have bothered her once, she realized. His silence would have unnerved her, and she immediately would have wondered what he was thinking, whether he was happy, whether he was tired of her or annoyed by her. Those overly-analytical little voices had been blessedly silent lately. She wasn't sure what had changed, but she was happy in this new quiet confidence.

She no longer panicked when she thought about the future, either. She had positively shocked Charlie over breakfast a week or two before when she had brought the topic of college up unprompted; he had struggled to keep his nonchalant cool, but she knew he was dancing on the inside. She hadn't been able to give him any specifics; she and Edward had been joking and bantering about college – about their future – for weeks, but had never talked seriously about where or when. But just the fact that she was willing to speak about it at all was a big step forward, and Charlie had gone back to his coffee and newspaper with his moustache twitching as if he were fighting to suppress a smile.

Bella felt a strange little glow, remembering. _He's proud of me,_ she thought.

She was proud of herself, really. Remembering the bad old days, she tried to recreate the train of thought that had once led her into a tailspin of anxiety every time she contemplated the future, and failed. Perhaps it was that moving on with her life no longer meant that her path would diverge from Edward's. Perhaps it was that they no longer hung in the impossible limbo of an untenable relationship. Perhaps it was that she no longer felt the constant low-level panic about growing old while Edward stayed perpetually frozen in time.  
Perhaps it was all of these things, and perhaps it was just the sunlight and the warmth of Edward's body beside hers. She gave a sigh of contentment and nuzzled against him.

"When we go to school, what are you going to major in?" Edward asked abruptly.

A bashful flush instantly rose in her cheeks, and she hid her smile in his shoulder. "I'm nervous to tell you."

He laughed. "Why?"

"Because I am." He could have teased her, but he was mercifully quiet. She felt a rush of gratitude. "Biology," she mumbled into his side.

"What?" Delighted, he pushed himself up onto his elbow, tumbling her over onto her back. "Biology?"

"Yeah," she said, blushing worse than ever. "I don't know – I think I got a taste for it when we were studying. I'm enjoying the work I'm doing with Dr. Wilson, and I'm good at it. And when I came up with my parasite theory…" She trailed off, remembering the flash of intuition, the terrifying thrill of puzzle pieces falling together. Despite the horror of the idea, for just a moment she had felt brilliant and powerful, even if her theory had turned out not to be true. She looked away, half-embarrassed, half-defensive, wanting him to understand. "Carlisle told me I had a scientific mind. Nobody… nobody ever told me that before."

She risked a glance at his face. He was grinning ear to ear. "Knock it off," she said, though her expression was beginning to mirror his in spite of herself.

He bent and kissed her thoroughly until she was grinning just as broadly as he was. "I'm proud of you," he said. "You say it like it's something to be embarrassed about, but I think it's wonderful."

Once she would have scrambled to change the topic, to turn the spotlight away from herself, but now she basked in Edward's approval. "You don't think it's a dumb idea?"

"Of course not." He smiled warmly. "And that means we can study together. We're going to be taking a lot of the same classes."

She blinked up at him, not understanding.

"If I remember correctly, usually you have to take lots of bio classes for pre-med," he said.

"Pre-med?" She surged up to sitting. "You'll be doing pre-med? You're going to be a doctor?"

"That's the idea," he said with a crooked smile.

"You're doing it for Carlisle." She made it a statement, not a question, and he nodded.

"Not music?" she asked softly. He had begun to play his piano again in the last few weeks, haunting melodies once more spinning through the Cullens' airy house. He had been rusty at first, but as he gained strength he spent hours at the piano in single-minded concentration, and soon recovered an otherworldly virtuosity that seemed all the more miraculous now that he was merely a human boy.

His face was briefly wistful. "It's tempting," he said, "but no. I'll always have music. Carlisle gave me back my life, though. I have to do something for him. I have to make my life mean something."

She reached out and touched his cheek. "Anything you do will mean something," she said. "I can't imagine anything more meaningful than the mere fact of your presence in the world."

He smiled absently, but his eyes were thoughtful, concerned. "I've been thinking," he said hesitantly. "For next year. What do you think about – what about Chicago?"

He had been gazing out at the trees, but now he met her eyes with a worried look. "Chicago?" she said thoughtfully. "I guess I've never really thought about it." He frowned, so she added, "There are a lot of colleges there, right? Angela has a cousin who went to Northwestern, and she said he liked the city so much that he stayed there after he graduated."

"Right," Edward said. "I've… I've been thinking about the University of Chicago."

Bella's eyebrows went up. "That's a really good school," she said. "I don't know if I could get in."

He sat up hurriedly. "Of course you could," he said, "and if by some ridiculous fluke you didn't, you said it yourself – there are plenty of good schools in Chicago. Northwestern and University of Chicago are just some of the big ones. There's DePaul, and Roosevelt, and Wheaton, and Lake Forest…"

He had begun poking her in the ribs with each name, and she collapsed into giggles, trying to fight him off. At last she managed to seize his wrists and hold him away. "Okay, okay," she said helplessly, laughing. "What's the big deal with Chicago, anyway?"

He sobered instantly. "That's where I grew up."

Her laughter died. "Oh," she managed. _Of course. I knew that._

She released his wrists but he turned his hands over and caught hers, intertwining their fingers. She waited, and at last he spoke. "I haven't been there in so many years. I've wanted to go back for a long time but something always stopped me. I… I didn't want to go, as… as I was." He looked away. "The University of Chicago. That's where my parents wanted me to go. Not Carlisle and Esme. My real parents."

Bella didn't know what to say. Edward never spoke about his childhood. "I've found myself thinking about them more recently. I even dreamed about them a few nights ago, and I could see them with perfect clarity. Not doing anything special – just the way they used to be. My father reading the newspaper. My mother –" His voice trembled, and he clenched his jaw. "My mother pouring tea, or writing a letter…"

Bella's heart went out to him. "I've never heard you talk about them before," she said softly.

He turned his brilliant green eyes on her searchingly. "Perhaps the memories are clearer than they used to be."

Thoughts of her venom parasite theory flashed through her mind, but she stayed silent as he continued. "I have so many memories that I didn't even realize were still there. I remember the sidewalk outside our house. There was a wrought-iron gate that squeaked no matter how many times my father oiled it. I remember where I used to play ball with the other boys on my street. I remember my school, and how time seemed to slow down as it got closer to the end of the day. I remember my nursery room – I had a hobby-horse that I used to clatter around the house with, for God's sake." Bella smiled, but her throat had closed. "And I remember a thousand conversations over the dinner table about the new university. My father was so proud that our city had such a school in it. An engine of progress, he liked to call it." Edward's mouth twisted, bitter and wry. "Back then, I used to think that his idea of progress was only the expansion of his own wallet. He wanted me to be a banker or a railroad baron or some such captain of industry. I think he liked to imagine that I would be the next Morgan or Rockefeller. I know now that they only wanted the best for me, but at the time, those conversations terrified me – my parents dreaming up brilliant futures for me. I remember how I used to feel such an awful panic whenever they brought it up – as if I didn't escape as soon as possible, my future would be a long string of offices and desks and ledgers. I couldn't bear the thought."

Bella squeezed his hands wordlessly. _I know exactly what you mean._

"I just wanted to be a soldier," he said. "I thought it would be a glorious life of bravery and heroism. All we boys did, back then. But I was too young for the Great War, and I think I blamed my parents for that too. I was even ready to run off and lie about my age to enlist."

He stopped, as if the words had been cut off at their source. Around them, the sunlight, the trees, the very air seemed to pause, waiting.

"I've never told this to anyone," Edward said. "Not even Carlisle. After he turned me, after I came to terms with what I was, I wanted to put my human memories as far behind me as I could. It was a different life, and I wanted to forget it. But I've been remembering. I don't always want to, but I remember.

"My father caught me the night before my friends and I were going to run away to enlist for the army. We quarreled – fought, really – like we never had before. He thundered at me and called me a child. I said the most hurtful things I could think of. I wanted him to understand how much I despised him, how I thought he was destroying my life.

"Now, you must understand, this was 1918, the year that the Spanish flu swept across the world. Already we had been seeing it, though we didn't know it for what it was. Our housemaid had been shivering and shaking for a week, and I had heard the cook coughing in the kitchen. I didn't know it, but my father was already taken with the disease by the night that we fought. Still, weakened as he was, he was a strong man and I was a boy, and he grew so angry that he knocked me down with one blow to the face.

"I remember lying on the floor and looking up at him in utter disbelief. He had never lifted a hand to me before, never, and this was in an era when no one thought twice of striking a child as punishment. He looked down at me, then turned without saying a word and left, locking me in my room."

Edward's voice shook. "By the time my mother unlocked my door in the morning, my father had already been taken to the hospital. My mother followed soon after, and I was taken myself soon after that. I never spoke another word to my father. By the time I woke from Carlisle's bite, my parents were dead."

At last he looked up to meet Bella's eyes, and she was shocked to see the tears that trembled in his. "And that's how I staged the ultimate rebellion," he said. "My parents wanted me to be the perfect adult. I found a way never to become an adult at all."

The tears rolled down his face, and in that instant Bella broke. She reached for him, drawing him in, gathering him into her arms. "It wasn't your fault," she murmured, kissing the tracks of his tears, salt on her lips. "It wasn't your fault." He shook silently in her arms for a moment. _So much time, _she thought. _So many things to carry, and so many hurts, over so much time._

When he pulled back after a minute, his eyes were red but his face was calm. She stroked his tousled hair back from his forehead.

"I was angry for so long," he said softly. "Angry at the world and at myself, angry at Carlisle for changing me – angry at him for even longer than I realized, long after I thought I had forgiven him. But I don't think I ever let myself grieve." He took a shuddering breath and let it out. "I'm sad for the boy I was. He's dead and gone, as surely as if he never was. And he was just a child. He was _innocent._" His eyes when they met hers were full of pain. "He was completely innocent in a way that I will never be again. He's gone and his life didn't mean anything."

She seized his shoulders. "It means something to me," she said fiercely. She held on to him as if she might be the only force holding him onto the earth. "Because of him, you are here. In spite of everything. You're here."

He looked up at her and smiled at last. "You're here too."

"Because of you."

His smile quirked bitterly. "In spite of me."

She shook him gently by the shoulders. "_Because _of you. Because of everything. I'm serious, Edward. My God, can't you see that? Can't you see how close we came?" She leaned in, holding him tightly – it was suddenly very important that he understand. "From the very start, we never should have met. We should barely even have been alive at the same time. Look – if Carlisle hadn't changed you, you would have died of influenza at the age of seventeen. Even if you had survived, you probably would have gone off to war and died in a muddy trench somewhere in France. Not to mention everything that has happened since then!" She ticked items off on her fingers. "If it had been any ordinary vampire who changed you, you might have been left to fend for yourself when you were newly turned. You might have destroyed so many human lives, and that would have destroyed you. Instead, Carlisle kept you safe. He proved that you could be the way you were, without losing your humanity or your mind. He brought your whole family together, and brought you all here to Forks. And he kept you alive through your transformation when _no one else in the world_ could have done it! Look at the past, and there are so many places where things might have gone wrong!"

He was watching her intently now, his brilliant green eyes hungry for her words.

"It's like... it's like our lives, our whole world, is a house of cards," she said desperately. "Any slip at any point in the past might have brought the entire future crashing down. But it didn't slip. You didn't die, not of the influenza, not in the war, not when the venom went out of your body. We're still here, and that must mean that _we've done something right._"

Somehow they were kneeling, facing each other. His arms were around her waist. She cupped his face with her hands.

"So maybe the house of cards isn't so fragile anymore," she said softly. "Maybe we can let ourselves breathe now, because if it hasn't fallen yet, I don't think it's going to fall, ever."

The breeze gusted once, lashing her hair around them, filling their ears with the rush of close calls, of connections barely made, the howl of other worlds, other lives. Then it settled and was gone. Edward let out a shaky breath, all at once.

She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead, a benediction. "It's done," she said. "I give you permission to stop punishing yourself for all the bad things that have happened to you."

He gathered her in to him and kissed her, long and deep, a kiss that went all the way through her, and suddenly it was urgent, crucial, _vital_ that they not wait a moment longer. _Perfect,_ she thought fleetingly, perfect how they matched, how their bodies called out to each other, how something with hormones and pheromones and mysterious intricacies of touch and taste and smell made him altogether irresistible to her, and her to him. _This is why_, she thought, _this is why I was his singer,_ and then his hands were under her shirt and they fell together on the blanket, and then thought went away entirely.

It wasn't elegant or expert, but it was passionate and unmixed with sorrow or regret. It was undiscovered country, barely glimpsed before. It was surprisingly easy and unspeakably more complex. She twined her legs around him and he moaned. He licked a path of fire from her collarbone to earlobe, then grinned and bit her softly on the neck, until she shrieked with laughter.

He blushed as he reached for his discarded jeans and pulled a condom from the pocket. She blushed as she told him shyly that she'd been on the pill for months.

When he pushed inside her, she thought _yes yes yes_ and clung to him as if clinging to life itself. He didn't last as long as he wanted to, perhaps, and she didn't come when he did, but his ecstasy was a tempest that carried her along before it, a bird on the wind. As he came panting down from his heights, he would have apologized, but she pressed her fingers to his lips and whispered that there was time enough for that later, time enough for everything.

And when he knelt between her legs and bent to kiss her there, there where she ached for him, his face was lit with pure joy, with desire so long denied, with the realization of a fantasy that would have been impossible before. Lips, tongue, fingers, teasing out the secrets at the soft core of her innermost secret self, and she was gone, arching, soaring.

They lay curled together on the blanket afterward, sweat drying on their bodies in the sunlight. Bella's head lay on Edward's chest, rising and falling with the gentle swell of his breath, and she thought she could never feel more complete. She traced the planes of his body, the delicate contours of his muscles, with her fingertips. In the clear light of day, his skin was milk and rose and gold.

"I thought you weren't going to remember me," she said, not abruptly, but as if she were picking up the thread of a long conversation. "When you woke up. I thought the venom was going to take your personality and your memories and you would wake up not remembering me."

Just like that first time, he opened his startling eyes – moss-green, forest-green, green as life – and looked into hers. "At first, I think I didn't," he said slowly. "I remember being a long way away. Or buried very deep. It was like…" He paused. "This has only happened to me once or twice since the change, but I remember it now from my human life. Do you know how it feels sometimes when you wake up from a deep sleep, and you're not exactly disoriented, but you're somehow emptied of yourself? And it takes a moment for the awareness of who you are to come back to you?" Bella nodded against his shoulder. "Well, it was like that, but so much farther. I felt completely clear, like I'd been purified by fire and everything I was had been burned away. And there wasn't even a way to find myself – not even a path, not even a light – until you looked into my eyes."

His body was warm and solid against hers, his arms tight around her, anchoring her to the earth. "But then it all came back," she said.

"Yes," he said. "It all came back."

The words rumbled through his chest, and she felt rather than heard them; felt the meaning in them, the time, the past, the layers of his life in their concentric tree-rings. For a moment she felt a hundred years old herself.

"Edward," she said. "You remember your time as a vampire?"

"I remember everything," he said in a low voice. A thread of sorrow wound its way into her heart. But then he said, "I don't think about it much anymore, though. It's like I've put those memories into a room and closed the door. The door isn't locked, the memories are all there, but… but I like the present better. It's not something I've tried to do. I think it's just the way my mind works now."

She pondered that. "Edward."

"Hmm?" His eyes were closed.

"So if you're going to go to the University of Chicago for your parents, and you're going to be a doctor for Carlisle, what are you going to do for yourself?"

He grinned without opening his eyes. "You," he said, and she laughed. "And anything I want to. We have a whole year before we're going to start school. We can travel. We can go meet the Dalai Lama. We can get a little apartment in Paris and eat bonbons all day."

She smiled against his shoulder, her heart lifting.

"Edward."

"Hmm?" A smile in his voice. She would never get tired of the sound of his name on her lips.

"You're going to get a sunburn," she said, running a hand over his pale stomach, lightly dusted with red-gold hair. "I don't think they've invented SPF ex-vampire yet."

"Har har," he said, but he rolled himself and her up in the blanket, and his hands crept to places where they'd recently been, and she shivered happily and pulled him tighter against her.

But their caresses were slower now, less purposeful, and Bella felt the sweet certainty of time stretching out before them. Wrapped up in his arms, she felt a rush of gratitude, joy bordering on awe, that he should be there with her after everything.

She lifted her head to tell him so, but stopped, because his face was twisted in a bizarre grimace, half pain, half terror. Despite the look of confusion and fear in his eyes, she didn't even have time to get concerned before his body convulsed and he sneezed, thunderously.

Just in time she dived out of the way, out of the blanket, howling with laughter.

"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed. "It gets me every single time. Do have any idea how terrifying it is to have to learn to sneeze again after ninety years? Every single time, I think I'm dying."

Bella rolled helplessly on the grass, barely able to breathe with laughter.

"Well, that killed the mood," Edward said, sitting up, grinning in spite of himself.

"No, no," Bella protested, crawling back to him, still laughing, and they fell together in a tangle. They were half on the blanket, sun in their eyes, grass in their hair. He rolled her over, kissing her, and she kissed back, matching him perfectly – her hunger as deep as his, her need as strong, her heart as full.

But the breeze over them shifted, and they both felt it. It was cooler than it had been before, and it carried the first barest hints of the autumn to come. Even below Edward's warm body, Bella shivered. Edward lifted his head and looked at the sun, which had begun to dip toward the treetops in the west. The little meadow was already half in shadow.

He looked back down at her, eyes full of regret. "Esme will worry if we're late for dinner," he said.

She smiled and kissed the downturned corner of his mouth. "We still have a long walk ahead of us."

They got up, brushing grass from skin and hair, retrieving their clothes. When they were dressed, Bella folded up the blanket and stashed it in her bag. Edward took a last look around the meadow, and the deep depression they'd made in the tall grass.

When he turned back, she was smiling at him. "Ready?" she asked.

"Ready."

He held out his hand, and she took it. His was warm from the sunlight, from their lovemaking, from his own human blood rushing just below the skin.

Hand in hand, they walked down the mountain.

_the end_


End file.
